


The Summer of '94

by saintsrow2



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mix of book and movie canon, Post-IT (2017), Pre-IT Chapter Two (2019), Slow Burn, Teen Years, plot heavy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:08:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 45,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27658637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsrow2/pseuds/saintsrow2
Summary: The summer of ‘94 was the last summer any of them would spend in Derry. It was also the summer when, only a couple of weeks after they had finished school and been turned free into the world for a little time longer before they were expected to pack up and leave town for good, Mike had reported to back to them all that the worst had happened.-Five years after defeating IT, school is over and Eddie doesn't have long before he leaves Derry forever. All he wants is to spend one final summer with his friends before he goes to college, but something else had other plans. There are ghosts haunting Derry, and Eddie must decide if he wants to stop them or escape to a new life and leave everything — and everyone — behind.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 45
Kudos: 121





	1. Prologue

_"...Then I need you to go back to childhood. And then, I need you to realise you cannot go back to childhood. And then I need you to cry like you've never cried."_

* * *

When he was thirteen years old Eddie Kaspbrak killed god, and three weeks later he started high school. 

The morning after he and his friends had beaten back the Boogeyman, become monsters more frightening than the devil itself, the sun had risen over Derry the same way it always did. The seven of them had clambered out of the sewers and walked the early morning streets, finding the town was mostly devoid of life at the crisp, golden hour of 5AM. Eddie had forgotten that other people existed at all; he was so shocked by the fact the rest of the world looked exactly the same that it didn’t cross his mind that other people were going to be part of the equation until Bill stopped dead in the street looking at their reflection in a store and Eddie saw himself for the first time in a day and was shocked with exactly how much he looked like a sewer rat. He was drenched in filth and it was at that exact moment he thought _fuck, Mom’s gonna be so mad at me._

He might have stopped IT, but he couldn’t throw his mother down a well. He hadn’t known what he expected to happen once he left the sewers, but he should have known from Richie’s warning about the milk cartons that his mother was going to be in a hysterical rage the size and scale of which he had never seen before, even after he’d broken his arm. She wept furiously when he walked in through the door but the adrenaline had run out of him and he was too tired to do anything but crawl into the bath and then to bed, unable to answer any of her questions with anything except a dopy, childlike, _sorry Mommy._ Afterwards he slept for fourteen hours and woke up to find his mother hovering in the doorway and was struck with the horrible fear that she’d been watching him the entire time, unmoving, just staring at him as he slept, an idea that made him cold with horror. 

He killed IT, but he was still afraid of his own mother. It was the first of the absurd paradoxes that would start to crop up in his life. He sat on the living room sofa as his mother sobbed and pleaded with him to never do anything so stupid again, and found himself sitting rigid in his seat and agreeing with everything she said because he was conditioned to, but the only thought in his head was that it was so strange he was expected to still do this. He didn’t know what else he would be doing exactly, but the memory of kicking Pennywise down and watching IT crawl away like a beaten dog was fresh in his mind and he was certain that the fact he was able to do _that_ should have counteracted _this,_ somehow. 

None of them had thought of a good excuse for what happened to them. They had been too consumed with the awful reality of their mission to stop and worry much about what lies they would feed their parents. Even Eddie, who normally devoted half of his brain power at all times to making sure he had convenient lies to tell his mother, hadn’t prepared anything. But in the end, they hadn’t needed to. Henry Bowers’ dad showed up with a slit throat, and then a fountain of corpses washed out of the Derry sewers, and other people joined the dots for them. The Losers Club was another group of kids who had been terrorised by Bowers but had, somehow, been lucky enough to get away alive. Bowers’ particular hatred for them all, especially Mike, was well documented enough that the story seemed like it was an open and shut case. The discovery of the bodies was an event so cataclysmic in its awfulness that it should have shot Bowers to the levels of infamy that was enjoyed by the likes of John Wayne Gacey and Ed Gein, but this was Derry, so no one talked about it and it got no further than the town limits. 

A week later they watched Beverly drive away, sitting in the passenger seat of her aunt’s car but leaning so perilously far out of the window that she could have tilted out and fallen into the road. This idea didn’t occur to her, but the potential horror of it flashed through Eddie’s mind and he screamed after her to be careful, but she either didn’t hear or didn’t care, just waved even harder, her red hair flashing in the sunlight. Ben, driven by something that Eddie told himself he did not understand, ran after the car for as long as he could, chasing it almost the whole way down the block until it finally turned a corner and was gone. He’d stopped then and just stood in the middle of the road for a little while. 

Beverly had spent the last week living at Ben’s house, after her father had dragged himself off the blood-splattered bathroom tile and allowed his monstrousness to be unveiled to the world, transparent and open about the evil he had been hiding for so long. Ben had asserted to his mother that there was no way that Beverly could _possibly_ go home, and Mrs Hanscom, who trusted her son, saw something to be concerned about in his terror. She was a newcomer to Derry too, and maybe that was what made her one of the few people who paid attention to the danger that other adults blinded themselves to, that had prompted her to pay attention to where her son went and what he did, and that made her go and talk to Mr Marsh herself before she dropped Beverly off at the apartment. It was a rare show of responsibility from an adult that had stunned Eddie, who normally thought about parents as unreasonable obstacles to be avoided at all costs; his general experience with adults outside of his own mother was the frosty wall of neglect Bill got, the constant anxiety of underlying, unspoken conflict that infected the Tozier household, or the stern sense of responsibility that Stan had been raised with. Arlene Hanscom’s reaction to seeing two kids scared out of their minds was to go and see if she could fix it, which was a new one on Eddie. 

Alvin Marsh had still been bleeding from a head wound when Mrs Hanscom arrived at the apartment, and had told her _exactly_ what he thought of his daughter in a babbling, incoherent rant, filled with profanity and hatred, that Ben and Beverly had been able to hear from the sidewalk outside. In no uncertain terms, he said if he saw her again, he would kill her. Mrs Hanscom had taken Beverly back home and called her aunt, saving Beverly’s life at the cost of ejecting her out of their lives. Ben had reacted to this with a sense of overwhelming betrayal, previously operating under the impression Beverly would have been able to just live with them forever, something that all of the other Losers also thought was a pretty reasonable assumption to have made. 

“This is so fucked up,” Richie had said, watching Ben slope back towards them with his head hanging low on his shoulders after the Buick was gone. “We killed Pennywise. Everyone else should like, just _give_ us what we want. I can’t believe we have to go back to school in two weeks.”

Eddie had not remembered school existed until that moment.

“How the fuck are we supposed to go back to school?” He said. 

There were a million books, comics, and films about kids saving the world and going back to their normal lives. Eddie had consumed hundreds of them; he had watched endless movies in Richie’s sitting room, lazed on Ben’s floor reading books from the giant stack of pulp novels that flooded the room, sat in the garage loft in his house and worked through comics over and over until the print stuck to his fingers. _The Goonies, The NeverEnding Story, The Chronicles of Narnia, Tron, The Wizard of Oz, The Last Starfighter, The Amazing Spider-Man, Back to the Future, Shazam, The Monster Squad, A Wrinkle in Time…_ The list of stories about kids saving the world and then going home again was endless. The stories, though, all had endings. They stopped after the adventure was done and told you to go home. They said the world was saved and everything after that would be alright. Nothing he had ever seen in his life had explained to Eddie that you could save the world and have the world stay broken.

He wasn’t sure what else he was supposed to do, so he got on with things. He had very little choice in the matter; he wasn’t going to be able to explain to the principal that he didn’t think he should have to go to school anymore because he had killed god in the sewers under the town and it limited his ability to care about geometry. It was easier to just start caring about geometry again. The others did much the same, in their own ways. They had no choice; they were thirteen, and there was no one in the world who would believe them. The first day of high school Eddie had walked into homeroom and automatically sat down between Richie and Bill, with Stan and Ben in front of them like a little protective triangle, only for the teacher to walk in ten minutes later and explain to them all she was assigning them seating for the semester and they were going to have to move. Richie had stared at her with a look so hostile that it could have been marked down as an act of declaring war, but it didn’t change the fact he had to go and sit in the back next to Nancy Townsend and Eddie had to stay in the middle by Kimberly Kilpatrick and Francis Johnson, who hated each other and spent the rest of the year throwing spitballs over Eddie’s head. 

The days of summer after IT was dead had all had a strange, liminal quality to them. Eddie had been banned from leaving the house, and Ben, Stan, and Mike’s families all decided their kids were better off playing indoors for a little while, which meant Beverly was cooped up with Ben too. The only ones who were allowed some element of the freedom they’d always enjoyed were Bill and Richie. Bill responded to this by taking up Mike’s offer of working on the farm and spent three weeks herding sheep and cleaning up after chickens for reasons that escaped Eddie entirely. Richie’s response had been to start sneaking in through the broken window in Eddie’s basement so they could sit in the loft over the garage. This worked until his mother caught them and had the window fixed, so Richie started climbing up to Eddie’s window by climbing the trellis on the side of the house. He did this almost every night for three weeks. Every time Eddie would freak out that Richie would fall off and every time Richie reacted with confusion that Eddie cared about this. 

“It’s not like I’m going to _die,”_ Richie said every time, with a scorn that suggested he didn’t think it was possible for him _to_ die. 

He was right though, he didn’t. 

When the bodies had washed out of Derry sewers the local Derry paper, _The Derry Bugle,_ had not printed photographs of it. It was simply too graphic, too unimaginably horrible to expose to people. The only people who had seen the full extent of it all were the police officers and coroners charged with the clean-up, and the Losers Club. Eddie didn’t stop Richie from coming to stay at his house. 

Those weeks of summer Eddie had kept waiting for something else to happen. Mike and Bill had come to some sort of understanding between the two of them that Pennywise _would_ — not just _could_ but _would_ — return, which was why the seven of them now bore matching scars on their hands. Eddie didn’t know if it was IT he was waiting for, exactly, but he knew he was waiting for something. The other shoe to drop. The end of the book. He spent his days listlessly, knowing that he had nothing to be afraid of but still scared, a kind of low-level, ambient fear, the sense that something was wrong and he couldn’t identify what. There needed to be _recognition_ of what had happened. The president needed to roll up in a limo and tell them all they’d done a great job. They needed to be given a million dollars. Georgie needed to walk back in the front door and everyone would be happy, then. There needed to be a statue of them all in the middle of town. There was no sense it was _over._

But nothing happened and then they went back to school and it finally dawned on Eddie that what marked this whole ordeal as being over was that his life continued the way it had always been. With nothing else to do, he sank back into the ebb and flow of his everyday life without resistance. For a little while, he had been the hero. The cast came off, the scar healed shiny and pink, he turned fourteen, snow blew in on the high winds. When summer came around again they found themselves in a mutual state of hypervigilance, watching sewer drains and listening out for stories of kids going missing, of bad things happening. Nothing did. When next summer rolled around Eddie was fifteen and spent more time worrying about whether or not he’d puke when he tried the weed Richie had scored off his older sister’s awful boyfriend than if the clown was going to come back. 

They got drunk for the first time that summer, off beer Bill had taken from his dad. Eddie had assumed he did this under the cover of darkness, taking great pains not to be caught, the way Eddie did everything around his own home. Bill turned up one day with eight clinking glass bottles in his backpack, the mixture of the childishness of the school knapsack and the intrinsic adultness of alcohol another one of those odd paradoxes that took Eddie aback. Sometimes he wondered if they weren’t too old to be carrying around shit like this. Surely they were older than their peers. 

Richie had also brought along a comically ornate bottle of whisky and between their limited supplies and their own immaturity and lack of alcohol tolerance they all managed to get fairly buzzed. The most alcohol Eddie had consumed before was communion wine, which just tasted like dirty grape juice. The beer was foul and the whisky burned his throat and made him cough, but he soldiered on, finding the alcohol mostly made him confused and headachey. Richie took on a borderline lunatic energy, storming around the clubhouse and arguing with himself and with anyone else who would talk to him. Eddie didn’t understand what was going on with him at first, and would not realise until the second time they got drunk, a week later, that the alcohol dissolved any kind of filter that Richie had and he was simply behaving the way he would if he said everything he was thinking. The idea was both terrifying and wildly exciting to Eddie, who responded by trying to keep up with him as much as possible, the night ending with them physically wrestling each other on the floor of Mike’s family barn, mostly ineffectually putting each other in headlocks and trying to stuff handfuls of straw in their faces because they wanted to annoy each other more than they did hurt anyone. Eddie didn’t know if he actually liked being drunk, but he assumed it was going to be an increasingly important part of his life, because that’s what happened when you were a teenager.

The third time they got drunk was also when he discovered that Bill’s method of getting alcohol out of his home was to walk to the fridge, take out a six pack, and walk out of the house with it while his father sat in the living room and stared disinterestedly at the television. Bill’s house scared Eddie, the same way Eddie knew his house scared the others. It didn’t operate the way homes _should,_ something they had all started to gradually realise over the years. Bill’s house was empty, and killing Pennywise hadn’t changed that. At fifteen years old, they all had a keen understanding that revenge felt good, but you had to get up and carry on with the rest of your life afterwards, and the good feeling was transient in a way trauma wasn’t.

Not, of course, that any of them had the capacity to understand what _trauma_ really was. They were familiar with images of shell shocked veterans coming home from war changed in some fundamental way, but none of them had put the pieces together to understand the same applied to them as well. When Eddie woke up in the middle of the night with his heart hammering in his chest until he felt sick he thought he was dying; the sweaty, shaking hands and breathlessness he got sometimes were symptoms of some vast disease to him, evidence that his mother’s conspiracy of illness maybe had truth to it after all. The nights Richie stayed over, or that he stayed at Richie’s, it was easier to roll over and go back to sleep.

Life continued. It had to. Eddie threw himself into other things to do, finding that it was the staying still that made him feel ill with some disease that wasn’t something his mother had ever told him about. If he stayed busy, kept his mind occupied, it was less time to worry, spreading his fear and anxiety thin across many things, like he was portioning it out into reasonable servings. 

Eddie and Ben were both in the running club at school. Eddie was technically not allowed to be, but he forged the permission slips from his mother for every track meet and Coach Woodleigh looked the other way because he adored Eddie, who consistently won gold medals and took his training seriously. Coach Woodleigh hated Ben as much as he loved Eddie though, and that made Eddie sick with rage. Ben approached the situation with a kind of silent, peaceful determination, which Eddie couldn’t understand at all. Every time Eddie beat his own best running time and Coach clapped him on the back and turned to smugly gloat at Ben, who was trailing at the back, Eddie wanted to rip off Coach’s legs like a wild animal. He wanted to be the monster again at those times, the one who had kicked off Pennywise’s head. But he wasn’t the boy who had killed god at Derry High, he was just another sixteen year old kid. 

“How do you just not care?” Eddie said to Ben one day as they were changing after practice, after another humiliating sneer from Coach Woodleigh had his hackles up.

“One day,” Ben said, “I’m going to be thousands of miles away from Derry. But Coach Woodleigh is always going to be a fucking high school gym teacher.”

Ben worked himself half to death. None of the Losers came from families who were flush with cash, but Ben understood more keenly than the rest of them how much things cost, and that included college. He was working to make sure he had scholarships to go to college by the time he was fourteen, and took on as equally as dogmatic and intensive an approach to his body and health. To Eddie, who also fell into micromanaging his food and exercise needs by the time he was old enough to understand the idea of nutritional value, Ben’s dedication unsettled him. Eddie wanted to run like a perfect machine. It was like Ben wanted to punish himself. 

Sonia Kaspbrak didn’t come to any of his races. The Losers came when they could to the races at Derry High, huddling by the side of the track in the brisk spring air and whooping him on. Richie came to all of them. Eddie never asked him to, Richie just silently took it upon himself, borrowing his sister’s car or sneaking into the back of the team bus to go with everyone to Etna, Newport, Bangor, even out to Castle Rock. He acted like it wasn’t a big deal, but he didn’t make the same effort to go out to follow the high school wrestling team to support Ben, or the tennis club for Stan. 

Richie and Bill did not take part in extracurricular activities. Richie and Bill had both been in the A/V club in middle school, and Richie had also played tuba in the school band, while Bill took piano lessons. In high school they dropped all of these hobbies. Eddie had pressed Richie on why he’d dropped out of doing stuff with the A/V club, which he had both enjoyed and excelled at, and Richie had shrugged.

“What’s the point?” He said. This confused Eddie, since Richie continued to watch films and fuck around trying to make films with the limited equipment they had available. He’d watched Richie spend hours with hooked up VHS players, painstakingly editing out the bits of film with a hyperfocus that was alien to him. Richie loved _movies._

It wasn’t about how much he did or didn’t like film, though. The contempt Richie and Bill had wasn’t for band, or music, or the concept of audiovisual clubs. It was for school. And more specifically, it was for the adults in school. Bill and Richie despised adults. Eddie had what he considered a healthy level of fear towards grownups, Ben, Stan and Mike had a normal mixture of respect and mild teenage rebellious instinct, but Richie and Bill _hated_ them. It was like a mongoose seeing a snake; they were both compelled to go against what was asked of them, to the point of being contrary for the sake of it. They hated grownups and they especially hated any grownup who thought they had the right to tell them what to do. This, predictably, made school difficult. There was more than one occasion when, in a fit of teenage rage, Bill had stormed out of the middle of class, which netted him a trip to the principal’s office. He always got a certain amount of leeway about this; his brother had been murdered, after all. Richie also got a little leeway, for a while, because everyone thought Henry Bowers had tried to kill him, but that died down faster than Bill, because they were all expected to go back to normal. Unfortunately, the expectations didn’t match up with reality. Bill didn’t think ‘normal’ existed anymore, and Richie didn’t care for it. They talked back, argued with teachers, argued with their parents, went where they wanted when they wanted, didn’t do homework, threw around their intense and aggressive mood swings with abandon. Eddie overheard a teacher asking how Bill had become such an unpleasant teenager and felt, again, that vicious monster inside himself that chewed the inside of his ribs like a tiger fighting the bars of its cage. 

The only adult Bill had any respect for was Mike’s grandfather. The one summer at the farm had turned into many. Bill had no issue with doing hard work. How he’d gone from being the average suburban teenager who didn’t even want to mow the lawn to someone who was voluntarily spending his free time hauling hay and fixing fences was beyond Eddie, but Bill saw some kind of value in it. Stan had something about the work being ‘straightforward’ and Bill had called him pretentious, which had resulted in them both melodramatically sulking about that conflict for the better part of twenty minutes, before Eddie accidentally called Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘Andrew Schweater’ which completely derailed any conversation for the entire evening. 

Richie still loved film. Bill, Ben, and Mike still loved books. Eddie’s interest in storytelling had dwindled rapidly over the years, and his primary means of consuming media had become video games, which often had no story at all, or at least not ones more complicated than excuses for why the action was happening. He played games for an hour or two almost every day, but rarely ever finished them. He played _A Link to the Past_ and _Castlevania_ for hours, but when it came time to finish the games he would start them over. Richie watched him once get up to the final boss in _Mega Man 5,_ turn the game off, and then begin it again. 

“Why the fuck would you do that?” Richie said in a mixture of bafflement and outrage, frowning at Eddie.

“I want to keep playing the game,” Eddie said, though he didn’t really have a good explanation. He felt an odd sense of shame about the fact he hadn’t really thought at all about what he was doing before he did it. Not playing through to the end was a force of habit by then. 

“The point of playing the game is to see the end,” Richie said.

“The point of playing the game is to play it,” Eddie said. “If you just want to get it over with, why play at all?”

Richie was oddly perturbed by the fact Eddie didn’t want to finish the games. Eddie found the fact Richie was rushing through it, wanting it to be over, as equally as unsettling. 

They were all rapidly growing up. Or rather, had been grownups far, far too soon. Stan, of course, had been thirty-five by the time he was about twelve, but that wasn’t the case for the rest of them. Ben and Mike had both had a sense of responsibility that was seen as mature for their age, but there had always been a naivety in them too, a sense of childhood wonder, though that was no longer particularly the case. Their mutual interest in Derry’s past had stopped being the kind of tourism into horror that drove many people to read about true crime and had become a kind of search for people who had undergone the same things they had. Bill and Richie considered themselves very grown up. They resented the orders of adults because, Eddie realised, they saw them as their peers. They wanted to be seen as adults, but grownups around them saw their young faces and their reckless, childish behaviour and condemned them both as being exceptionally immature. It was a kind of vicious cycle.

Eddie, too, was normally considered mature for his age. But that was largely because he wore a front when adults could see him, one where he talked sensibly and in a measured way and didn't get into silly, petty fights. Throughout high school Eddie was told by three or four separate teachers, including the principal, that Richie was dragging him down and holding him back. On one particularly horrifying morning when they were seventeen, Eddie had driven a vomiting Richie home from the house of Lila Harrison, who had had a party the night before, Wentworth Tozier had pulled Richie from the car and dressed down his son in front of the entire street and Eddie.

"Why can't you be more like Eddie?" Wentworth had said, red in the face and furious to see Richie was severely hungover, had thrown up on his own shoes and was shaking with cold because he was wearing a severely awful gothy sleeveless shirt he'd shoplifted from a vintage store in Bangor. It was far too baggy on him and looked kind of laughable, but Richie was trying to find things for people to notice and make fun of that weren't the usual, weren't actual marks of his character. "All your stupid fooling around, you're just dragging him down with you."

Eddie had been so angry in that moment he'd wanted to rip the steering wheel out of the car and throw it at Wentworth, but that was both insane and impossible, so he'd just tried to psychically beam anger and resentment into his skull, sitting so stiffly in his seat that his joints locked rigid. Richie had stared at the ground and made some biting remark about not having a good parental example to follow, which Eddie hadn't really heard but instantly, instinctively agreed with, before Went had dragged him into the house. Richie had snuck out later and come over to Eddie's house, lying in a half fetal position on Eddie's bed while Eddie lay next to him, periodically stroking his fingers through the curls of Richie's increasingly untameable hair while the stereo blasted The Cure. 

"I'd rather be dragged down with you than end up like your dad," Eddie told Richie, who snorted with laughter and continued his quest to bury inside Eddie's body by pressing his face as hard as he could against the side of Eddie's chest.

They were starting to resemble the adults they would become by the time they were seventeen. Bill had surprised them all by staying short, stopping growing when he was sixteen and staying there, and additionally cultivating a kind of floppy-haired handsomeness, modelling himself on Kurt Cobain. Ben both grew and shrank, shedding weight but gaining both height and muscle, something that turned him into a very sudden centre of attention when it came to girls, which paradoxically pushed him further inside his shell. Mike and Richie had both shot up as well, now looming over the other members of the Club, as well as gaining strong jaws and broad smiles, though Mike looked like a fairy tale king and Richie looked more like he lived in the backroom of a comic book store and had never lifted a weight heavier than a slushie. Stan and Eddie had done the expected and just become taller versions of their child selves, though Eddie felt that Stan was better off for it, having become fairly handsome, while Eddie thought there was something distinctly rattish about his looks, and he loathed how painfully skinny and awkward he was. Richie's sudden growth spurt had left him chronically clumsy, unused to managing such long limbs. Eddie had the same look of a baby deer, mostly because of his big eyes and scrawny limbs, but was too anxious to be clumsy, instead managing his physicality with an obsessiveness matched only by how careful and considered Bill's speech was. 

Eddie wondered what Beverly looked like at seventeen. He hadn't seen her since she left, despite her promises she would come back. She had called and written letters for a little while, and then stopped. One time Eddie had called her and she had not recognised his voice, then was distant and slightly confused for the brief conversation they had afterwards, her attention clearly wandering and her interest not matched by his, as if she didn’t really know what he wanted from her. They had all stopped calling her after Ben had seemed particularly traumatised by some conversation they'd had when he was fifteen; if Eddie were to venture a guess, it would be that he'd had the same uncomfortable, uninterested conversation that he'd had with Beverly, but knew that would hurt Ben much, much more than it did himself. Bev had been someone Eddie loved fiercely for one long, awful summer, and then she exited his life. She was one of his best friends, the same way Stan, Mike, Bill, and Ben were. She wasn't _his_ person the way she was Ben's. The way Richie was his.

They — that was, Ben, Eddie and the stupidly supportive Richie — had gone to a track meet at a high school in Portland when Eddie was seventeen. It was the first time they'd gone to this particular school, who had only just gotten their own running track. None of them knew if it was the school Bev had gone to, but all three of them had an unspoken agreement to keep their heads on the swivel, looking out for her. Standing around the starting point, however, Eddie had floated the question of Beverly's existence to one of the runners from the local school. He had shrugged and said he wasn't sure if he'd heard of her, and that was all the information they got. She had vanished into the wider world like a dream they'd all woken up from, and she would not return.

Ben had been silent on the ride home. He didn't talk about it, and he did not ever mention Beverly again. None of them did. None of them really liked to talk about the past, though it was laced through their growing lives more than they wanted to admit. Bill wouldn't go outside when it was storming, and him and Mike read obsessively about the kind of esoteric imaginary creatures that Eddie could never have even imagined. Books about aliens, cryptids, and witchcraft started to mount up inside the Denbrough home. The ones about witchcraft scared the living daylights out of Mike's grandmother, who was a good Christian woman in a literal, genuine way, and didn't like that kind of thing. Mike kept his books at Bill's, which was fine, because the two were inseparable anyway and had only gotten worse over the years. Not that Eddie could really criticise.

He wondered sometimes, if Mike and Bill had ever kissed. Bill went through girlfriends quickly; once he had mastered concealing his stutter he had adopted a kind of haunted poet like energy and was suddenly considered very attractive by a lot of the girls in school, which was an upgrade in his eyes. He dated many girls throughout high school, but rarely for very long or very seriously. Bill had a tendency to either be too intense about relationships or take them completely for granted, only able to follow one extreme or another. Mike had had a few girlfriends over the years, mostly people he knew through church, though he briefly dated a girl who went to school with the Losers. His relationships seemed fairly chaste and short lived; he simply did not have much free time and he was growing up to be a person who was both very strange and very self-assured in his strangeness, something that outsiders found off putting. All the evidence did point towards Bill and Mike being straight, but they spent a lot of time together without anyone else. 

Eddie and Ben didn’t really ever date throughout school. Eddie didn’t really have the time or the interest, and while Ben had become tall and athletic in his later teens he had not become any more confident and reacted generally to outsider attention like he was being tricked. Stan had a few girlfriends. Richie, if you believed him, was fucking every woman in the state of Maine. Eddie knew this wasn't true, because when Richie wasn't with the rest of the Losers Club, he was with Eddie.

Eddie had become very interested in which of his friends were straight. A lot of the kids in school were very interested in who was or wasn't straight, but that was in a way that was laced with menace or with a perverse curiosity. He had been asked by a couple of giggling girls in his year if Richie was gay, something they regarded as being 'totally cool, if he was'. Eddie told them no, because Richie told him the answer was no, and it wasn’t his place to decide otherwise. 

He wanted to know, though, very badly. He wanted desperately to know if Richie was gay. He couldn’t _ask,_ because asking would be a betrayal that Eddie didn’t think could ever be forgiven. Many kids at school wanted to know if Richie was gay, and Richie did a lot of things to prove he wasn’t. Somehow this had the effect of compounding the rumours harder. Eddie mostly managed to avoid them; he got hit with some of it, of course, because high schoolers were obsessed with the potential horror of homosexuality being in their general vicinity, but they never stuck the way they did to Richie. Maybe it was because Eddie did sports, or people were more interested in mocking him for his myriad health issues, or because Eddie wasn’t as wonderfully strange and reactive a target as Richie. Many kids didn’t date much in high school, but Richie made such a production about his relationship status that it brought more eyes to him. Eddie just didn’t date. Richie talked about the girls he fucked, talked about girls he wanted to fuck, talked about how attractive and straight and beloved he was. The void around him begged for attention. 

"Relationships are fucking stupid," Richie had told them all one night, when the subject had come up. They were in Bill's garage, a place where a large amount of stupid shit occurred, because no one paid attention to Bill's garage. "Like, no one ever really falls in love. They just get married so they can have kids and shit."

Stan, who had just broken up with Abby Rosenstock, who he had dated for four months and actually really liked, was not impressed by this.

"You only think that because you're not capable of love," Stan said from his position sitting on one of the folding chairs at the small card table that was stored permanently in the garage. "My parents love each other."

"Your parents got married so they could bone, same as everyone else who got married when extramarital sex was illegal," Richie said. He had then jumped onto the old beat-up couch that had made it to the garage but not to the rubbish dump yet and would meet its fate two months later when Bill and Richie dragged it out into the street and set it on fire. He stood on the couch and held an empty beer bottle up as a representation of a dick, turning his voice high and sharp when he shrieked. "Oh! Oh Rabbi Uris! Oh, fuck me Rabbi Uris!"

Stan had responded by hurling a slice of pizza at him, which hit the floor but Richie had eaten anyway, even when Eddie threatened his life over it.

Richie stayed firm on the idea that love didn't exist, though. None of the other Losers argued with him. The topic made Ben and Bill both miserable, Mike refused to dignify Richie with a response, and Eddie agreed with him fervently. There was something comforting to him about the idea love didn't exist. It made it a little easier to cope with his mother's loud and angry tears every time he let her down by going to school on a day when she decided she didn't want him to, or when he drove on a day she thought it would be dangerous, or when she took away his things 'for your own good, Eddie-bear'. She thought she was acting out of love, but Eddie stayed comfortable in the idea that love didn't exist. It made it easier to accept that her actions weren't born from love at all, but from whatever sickness infected the adults of Derry and turned them putrid.

In 1994 they entered the final year of school after they returned from winter break. It was a few months of frantic, awful horror. Ben and Eddie both needed to graduate with good enough grades to secure their scholarships and buckled down on work in a frenzy that was only matched by Stan, who was determined to get into a good school. Mike, who was home-schooled, did the required exams he needed to graduate at an entirely different pace to the rest of them and exited the entire ordeal far more serenely than the rest. He knew the grades he had to get to go to the University of Maine in Orono and that was all he needed to get. Stan, horrified by the fact Mike was shooting his goals so low, had asked why Mike didn't try for somewhere higher.

"I have to go somewhere I can commute to," he said, with a smile that was more sympathetic than it was happy. "I have the farm. I can't leave my grandparents."

He had stopped mentioning Florida when he was fifteen.

Richie and Bill on the other hand, didn't care. The only people monitoring Bill's grades were Bill's teachers, who tried helplessly to push him, but he only worked hard in classes he cared about, which was maybe half of them. Occasionally his parents would get on his case about school, but the attention never lasted for very long and was never very focused. Eddie had overheard an argument with Bill's parents once and realised very quickly that Zach Denbrough had forgotten his son had just turned eighteen and was maybe going to college in the fall; in his mind, Bill was permanently in a vague state of adolescence, but which it was, he didn’t know. His son was a stranger to him. 

Richie's parents cared very deeply about Richie doing well and going to college, but their methods of approaching making him work hard were pointless. They threatened to take away his things, but he would steal them back or get new ones. They tried to ground him, but he simply wouldn’t stay home, or otherwise would make his presence in the house so loud and obnoxious it was better to have him out. They stopped short of actually kicking him out of the house, probably because they knew if they did, he wouldn’t come back. In the end, they could no more stop Richie from skipping class with Bill than they could rewind time and stop themselves from having a second child. Eddie rarely skipped school, barely able to keep up with work because of the days his mother made him take off, and had had an explosive argument with Richie about it the previous year. Richie didn't understand why Eddie gave a shit about school at all. Eddie had told Richie, very plainly, that school was probably the only way he was ever going to get out of Derry. Richie had spent the day after the fight stomping around the clubhouse smoking cigarettes and periodically going to throw rocks in the river, but he'd crept into Eddie's house that night to curl up next to him on Eddie's tiny bed and rest his head on his shoulder. He didn't ask Eddie to stay, though. 

They all went to prom that year too. It was a disaster. Eddie almost didn't go at all, mostly because he was too chickenshit to ask anyone and had fled the school library when Courtney Ormand had tried to ask him, a story that spread around the school like wildfire. Eddie had gone with Richie to throw firecrackers about it, until Mike had yelled at them for doing it too close to the family barn and it had turned into one of the rare but occasional Richie and Eddie v Bill and Mike fights that happened periodically, normally when Richie pissed off Bill by doing something immensely stupid or hurtful or Bill said something insensitive and clumsy.

In the end, he'd asked Kimberly Kilpatrick, which turned the narrative in the school around to the idea that Eddie had told Courtney no because he really had a crush on Kimberly, which suited Eddie just fucking fine. It was a more flattering story for him, though it hurt Courtney's feelings immensely, something he felt a little guilty about after he heard she hadn't gone to prom at all in the end.

But he only had room to be so guilty, because all of prom was a nightmare. Someone spiked the punch, which was unfortunate, because Richie _also_ spiked the punch, turning the red liquid into something borderline undrinkable and so strong it made several of the kids sick. Kimberly and her friends got into an argument with Francis Johnson and his friends, which resulted in Eddie being expected to fight Francis on Kimberly's behalf. Francis thought this was very funny because all of the school thought that Eddie was a little mommy's boy pussy, because none of them knew what Eddie and the others did, which was that Eddie had kicked a god in the skull and killed it when he was thirteen years old. Unfortunately for Francis, Eddie was very aware of this fact and was also drunk on punch that was roughly 75% vodka, and didn't have the mental fortitude to not nail Francis in the face with a hit that broke his glasses.

The fight that ensued involved four of the five present members of the Losers Club, Ben getting dragged into it against his better judgement after Walt Emmett said something hideous and punched him in the stomach when Ben was doing the thankless task of trying to stop Richie from beating Walt's face in. Most of the school also didn't know that when you pissed Ben off or hurt his friends that he could be very mean indeed, and after three years of high school wrestling and a workout regime as severe as his, he was far stronger than Walt Emmett had really been prepared for.

The five of them had fled the scene without their dates and gone up to Mike’s farm, spent the night in the barn blasting music and getting so profoundly drunk that they had fallen asleep in the hay and then gotten yelled at by Mike’s grandfather at 6 AM. During the middle of the night, when he was drunk and dancing with Richie to What is Love, Eddie had briefly felt completely invincible. The six of them were, in his estimation, the greatest and most important people in the universe, which was largely filled with fucking awful people. There had to be better people out there in the world, but he found it pretty hard to believe.

His love of his friends came to an abrupt halt when they were called into school on Monday and told that there was a chance they might not graduate because of the incident that had happened at prom. It took the combined force of Wentworth and Maggie Tozier, Donald Uris and Arlene Hanscom throwing a fit to get the principal to accept that the kids had been acting under self-defence and had worked hard and were allowed to graduate on time. Sonia Kaspbrak had, conspicuously, nothing to say about the matter. It probably suited her fine if Eddie got kicked out and couldn’t go to college. Unluckily for her, though, Eddie did graduate. He did well, too.

That summer all six of them went to a party held by kids far more popular than them that apparently the entire school attended. Richie, Mike, and Bill took ketamine; Mike and Bill went to some place of mutual spiritual nirvana while Richie clung to Eddie with a limpet-like affection. That was fine by Eddie, who was drunk and caught up in the dreamlike concept of freedom actually being available to him. They were partying in someone’s backyard, and the sky was lit up by the large bonfire that was built in the house’s firepit, that now contained everyone’s graduation caps. The air over that block stank like burning plastic for days afterwards, but it wasn’t anywhere near where Eddie lived and he was too drunk to care about carcinogens that night. 

“I get it now!” He said to Richie.

“What?” Richie said.

“Finishing school, that’s the ending,” he said. “That’s the end of the story.”

Richie had gone very pale and changed the subject. Eddie didn’t really notice; he was filled with the glow of optimism and excitement about the future. All of them were. They were getting out of Derry and they were never, ever coming back. 

The summer of ‘94 was the last summer any of them would spend in Derry. It was also the summer when, only a couple of weeks after they had finished school and been turned free into the world for a little time longer before they were expected to pack up and leave town for good, Mike had reported to back to them all that the worst had happened.

IT was back.


	2. 1: Confirmation Bias

The air was clammy that day, humid. Eddie, already struggling with a hangover that was leaving a pounding ache behind his eyes, was really suffering. He was lying on the grass of Bill's yard, his head butted up against Richie's calf. He was using Richie's jacket as a pillow, because the day was really far too hot to wear the fucking thing, and he didn't want dirt in his hair. The sun beat down on them mercilessly and standing over the five of them as they lay around on the floor, Mike looked like he had been dropped down where he stood by God. Eddie shaded his eyes with his hand as he looked up at Mike, whose face was grave.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Richie said. There was a bite of tiredness to his voice. Eddie got the impression he hadn't wanted to leave the house at all that day, but Mike had called them all in a panic and demanded they meet at Bill's, and they generally listened to Mike. He didn't have quite the demanding authority that Bill sometimes did, but Eddie found that most of the time, when Mike said something, he was inclined to believe it.

This was an exception. Eddie didn't think he wanted to believe what Mike was saying this time and he felt relieved that Richie was questioning him, though he didn't say anything, staying quiet in his place on the ground. The sky was so open and so blue that it hurt to look at, turning white at the very peak, around the sun.

"Last night," Mike said, "I saw something."

"Yeah, you saw something, we were all fuckin' high," Richie said.

"Not all of us," Stan said.

"Ok, but we were all wasted," Richie said. "Wait, you didn't drop acid without me, did you? I said next time you guys did acid I wanted some."

He looked reproachfully at Mike and Bill. Bill was sitting on the ground next to Mike's legs and despite the lower level, maintained a slightly imperious air. The buzzsaw in Eddie's head whined and made his ears ring as a loud car trundled past, down the streets.

He'd been woken up by Mike's call at about 9 AM, which was only six hours after he'd rolled into the house and he was fairly pissed off to have been woken up by his mother bursting into his room to declare, loudly, that he had a call he needed to go and answer. It wasn't really Mike's fault — his mother would have kicked him out of bed if he tried to sleep too late no matter what — but Eddie was still silently harbouring a slight grudge. He'd dragged himself out of bed but he'd had to run to the toilet and try to hide the fact he was throwing up from his mother, who would latch onto any sign he was sick and turn it into a weeks long drama. Eddie was fairly certain if she saw a single sign of weakness in him at this stage it would turn into a lethal weapon.

He could see it in her eyes sometimes, the way she looked at him. The whites huge and the thinness of her lips. She was scared. Really scared. The monster in his chest laughed at her for it.

He'd managed to do a good enough job that she hadn't caught on that he was hungover and he'd forced himself out of the house and down to Richie's to kick him out of bed and drag him down to Bill's. Mike had informed him that Mrs Tozier had cut off Mike's appeal for her to wake up Richie with an abrupt:

"He's sleeping."

before hanging up on him. Eddie had taken it upon himself to collect Richie. When he'd arrived at the house, squinting in the horribly bright sunlight, Richie's sister had answered the door.

Ilana was home to visit their parents, though Eddie wasn't sure why she'd bothered. Richie had been complaining about her since she'd arrived a few days ago. The issue wasn't so much her presence and more that her being around caused even more arguments with his parents, who were not particularly impressed by the fact Ilana had graduated from culinary school a year late, and even less impressed with her desire to move to LA. Richie didn't have a lot of charitable things to say about her either, though Eddie knew from experience that Richie liked his sister a lot more than he liked his parents.

"Oh, my God," Ilana said. "Every time I see you I forget that you're so grown-up now. I keep expecting you to be about three foot and yapping."

"Hi, Ilana," Eddie said. "I need Richie."

"God knows why," Ilana said, fondly. "You should come in."

The Tozier household was generally neat and tidy. Mr Tozier was a dentist; Mrs Tozier did something very confusing with accounts and computers that Richie had never accurately explained. The biggest interruption to the ecosystem was Richie, who had never seemed like he belonged in the household. His VHS tapes — _Evil Dead, Gremlins, Tremors_ — were rammed into the bookshelves next to father's books on fishing and his mother's historical epics, and his video game systems coiled around the carpet like eels dropped into a goldfish bowl.

Ilana waved towards the stairs before she headed back to the kitchen, suggesting that Eddie should just go upstairs by himself. It was a fairly understandable request. Eddie had spent almost as much time in the house as he had in his own growing up, and Ilana treated him with the same mixture of almost equal disregard and affection that she did her own brother. Eddie liked it more than he really wanted to admit to her face.

Jogging up the stairs, Eddie ran into Mrs Tozier, who was walking down the hallway and didn't look thrilled to see him. She was never _rude,_ as such, but Eddie knew that he was not a priority to her. She was a well-dressed and well made-up woman, standing in sore opposition to Richie's scruffy T-shirts and hole-y jeans or Ilana's low-riding jeans and crop tops. Eddie was fairly sure she didn't like him. He didn't know why, exactly, because he had been unfailingly polite to her ever since he had met her when he was five, but he'd noticed the way she treated Bill and Stan was always slightly different to the way she treated him. None of them were particularly people she wanted to deal with, but there was always a look on her face when Eddie came around, as though he was an annoying customer returning with another question.

"Oh, Edward," she said. "Did Ilana let you in?"

"Yeah, sorry," he said, hating himself for saying it.

"Hm. Well. Richie is asleep," she said. "You could wait downstairs, but he came in late so I imagine he won't be up for a while."

"It's fine, I'll go wake him up. It's important." Eddie's stomach clenched with fear at the refusal of the polite suggestion.

Mrs Tozier had a muscle in her jaw that flexed when she was annoyed. Eddie had noticed Richie doing the exact same thing.

"I don't know if that's appropriate," she said. "He's asleep."

"He won't mind." His voice was so people-pleasing, so grovelling, he wanted to be sick from it.

Richie's room was right behind her, the first door on the left when you went upstairs, so it was easy for Eddie to slide past her and directly into it. His heart was hammering in his chest when he did, but Mrs Tozier didn't say anything else or move to stop him. He let the door close after himself.

Inside Richie's room was dark. There were black curtains hanging over the window but the material they were made from allowed for odd pinpricks of bright light to shine in, thin strobes of light that shot across the room, reflecting off the shiny material of the dozens of posters that Richie lined the room with, as if he was trying to insulate it. The room had been painted a deep blue in Richie's teens, right onto the garish pale green wallpaper that had decorated it for most of his childhood. This had not been done with Richie's parent's consent, and the darkness of the room was a constant point of contention. According to the Toziers, the darkness made the room small.

And maybe it did. The room felt very small and very warm indeed that morning, even though the sun wasn't at its peak. Richie was sprawled over his bed, on top of the covers, in the clothes he'd been wearing at the party last night. He hadn't even gotten as far as pulling off his jeans before he'd passed out, though he'd had the foresight to remove his glasses and leave them on the floor next to his bed. The room looked like a bomb had hit it and knocked everything Richie owned onto the ground. Eddie couldn't step into the room without standing on comics, clothes, cassette tapes or abandoned food wrappers or cigarette cartons. This was the normal state of affairs for Richie; the only difference now was that he no longer had a mountain of disorganised schoolwork sloping across his desk like an avalanche, which had been a permanent feature for the last five years. Eddie knew Richie had taken every piece of schoolwork he'd had left and burnt it. Eddie knew because he'd given Richie the matches.

"Richie," Eddie said.

Richie was snoring.

"Richie."

He snored louder, though he did roll over from his side onto his back, an arm draped over his eyes.

Eddie leaned over to poke him awake.

"Rich-"

He didn't get very far because as soon as he was within reach Richie sprung awake like a monster from the deep and grabbed Eddie, yanking him down on top of him. Eddie shrieked with shock as he hit the mattress with flailing limbs, struggling against Richie's grip. Richie laughed hysterically as Eddie lay on the bed next to him and tried to wait for his brain to stop rattling around his head like a marble that had been thrown down a flight of stairs.

"You scared the shit out of me, asshole," Eddie said, elbowing Richie in the ribs.

He was half lying on the bed and half lying on Richie, his head on Richie's arm in a kind of almost hug. Richie was unpleasantly sweaty from the heat and his skin stuck to Eddie's cheek. It was gross. Eddie's heart was pounding in his chest. From the fright, of course.

"What the fuck are you doing here at ass o'clock?" Richie said. His voice was rough this early.

"Mike called. He said it was really important."

Richie wrinkled his nose in distaste. "Important how? Like, Bill has leukaemia important or he thinks one of our teachers is a vampire important?"

"I don't know. He sounded really scared on the phone. Like, it sounded serious."

Richie groaned and drooped, throwing both his arms around Eddie and making him yelp with the suddenness of the hug he was caught in. Richie pressed his forehead against the top of Eddie's head.

"It's all too much for me," Richie said. "Let's just stay in bed all day. My head feels like someone fuckin' barfed in it and then shook it all around."

"Gross! Richie!"

"C'mon..." Richie yawned into his ear and Eddie wriggled in theatrical protest.

The door to Richie's room opened suddenly and Mrs Tozier stood in the doorway, looking at them both. Richie sprung away from Eddie very suddenly, letting go of him and bouncing off across the bed like he was trying not to get caught with illegal contraband. Eddie lay rigidly on the bed and wished he could fall through a hole in the earth.

"Please don't lie on the bed with your clothes on," Mrs Tozier said.

"Sorry Mrs Tozier," Eddie mumbled, sliding off the bed and moving to awkwardly stand at the side of the room.

"I do the laundry, who cares?" Richie said.

"I care," she said.

Richie rolled his eyes theatrically. He pushed past his mother and jogged down the stairs, Eddie slinking after him, Maggie Tozier's eyes burning into the back of his skull the whole time he followed.

Ten minutes later they were in Eddie's car and driving to Bill's house, Richie with his hands over his eyes complaining the whole time about the sunlight. Not long after that all six of them were assembled in the yard, watching Mike drop the last piece of news any of them had ever wanted to hear.

"It wasn't drugs!" Mike said, after Richie's needling.

"The clown is fucking gone," Richie said. He sounded exhausted, primarily, and a little annoyed.

"We knew it wasn't going to go forever, though," Ben said. "We always knew it would come back."

There was a knot of worry in his eyebrows, eyes darting between Mike's face and the others.

"I thought we got rid of it," Stan said. He was sitting on the ancient swing that was hanging from a tree, just wood on a rope, such a rustic cliche of childhood it didn't even look real. The fact it would be hanging in Bill's yard of all places seemed like a joke, to Eddie.

"Not permanently," Bill said. Bill rarely talked quickly, these days. He was careful with his words, which made it even more infuriating when he said something stupid. "How were we supposed to kill something like that? IT was a god. We were just kids."

"Then why did we even fuckin' bother, Bill? Jesus," Richie said. "What did you even see, Mike?"

Mike swallowed. "It was when we were at the party-"

"So you _were_ high."

"Don't tell me you know what I saw!" Mike said. "I'm not crazy."

There was a high, defensive note in his voice, and he was glaring at Richie now. Richie lapsed into a sullen silence, ripping a handful of grass out of the ground.

"I didn't say you were crazy," he said.

"When we were at the party, I looked out over the river, and on the other side of it, I could see this building in the woods," Mike said. "I didn't really recognise it, so I went to go and see what it was. When I started to get closer, I realised what it was. The Black Spot."

"The club?" Ben said.

"Yeah. The one that was burned down," Mike said. "Except it was there looking... As new as when it had been built."

"That doesn't sound like what IT does," Stan said. "Where were the monsters?"

"I didn't get close," Mike said. "But what else is going to be showing us something from the past?"

Eddie bit his tongue. He wanted to tell Mike that he was wrong — or rather, he wanted to _know_ that Mike was wrong. For there to be some kind of definitive evidence that what he had seen had been something else. But there was nothing, and while Mike and Bill were more inclined to believe in magic than the rest of them, none of them were really able to fully deny the existence of the supernatural. Not after everything they'd all lived through.

"If IT's back," Bill said. "We have to stop it."

"Oh, fuck that," Richie said.

Everyone looked at him. Sitting on the grass, his hair in his eyes and the sun beating down on him, Richie looked like he'd been dragged out of a gutter. He hadn't changed before he'd left and he hadn't eaten or drank anything, either. He looked miserable, in fact, as miserable as Eddie felt.

"We made a promise," Stan said. "If IT came back..."

"Yeah, when we promised that, I thought killing IT had fucking done someone some good," Richie said. "Why the fuck would I risk my life again for this shithole?"

"Because no one else will," Bill said. "And if you don't, you're as bad as all of them."

Richie clenched his jaw. A muscle twinged.

"We don't know if it's IT," Eddie said. "We don't know anything yet."

"I know what I saw," Mike said.

"If Mike says he saw IT, I believe him," Bill said.

"Except Mike didn't see IT, he saw a shed," Eddie said. He struggled to sit up. "I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying we need to see a little more, like, proof. I'm not running into the fucking sewers."

"If IT was here, there'd be missing kids. Bodies. Murders," Stan said. "There's been nothing."

"What if it's trying to lure us back?" Ben said. "Finish the job?"

The other five of them groaned.

"Why did you have to fuckin' say that, Haystack?" Richie said. "Great, now that's all I'm going to be able to think about."

"We don't have to go into the sewers right away," Mike said. "But we need to keep our eyes open. For signs."

"You say that like I've been able to _stop_ looking for signs," Stan said.

"Yeah, maybe you're seeing it because you're looking for it," Richie said. "What's that called? Stan?"

"Confirmation bias."

"Yeah."

Mike and Bill were looking steadily more and more pissed off.

"I think they have kind of a point," Ben said. "We need to do a little more research, first. At least find out if any other kids are going missing.”

Bill and Mike looked at each other. Eddie loved them both like his brothers but the sun and his migraine were making him testy and at that moment he wanted to shove them off their mutual high horse. They were a group of teenagers, it felt weird that they had _leaders_. They weren't at war.

"That's true," Bill said. "But if IT's back, we have to do something."

"How the fuck are we supposed to stop it if there's only six of us anyway?" Richie spat back.

The void in the centre of the group sang louder. Eddie tried to look away from it, but it was impossible to ignore.

"I don't know," Bill said.

There was no going back home that morning. It was turning into a gloriously hot and sunny Saturday, the exact wrong kind of weather for Eddie's mood. He ended up driving Richie and Stan to Little Spoon diner, one of their usual haunts, so they could get some late breakfast. Richie slid into one of the booths and laid his forehead against the cool Formica tabletop.

Eddie sat opposite him and Stan sat beside him, leaving Richie the room he wanted to spread out across the tacky faux-leather seat. He left his head on the table as the waitress came over to take their order. Her name was Dina, and she was more familiar with their goings-on than their own mothers were half the time.

"Coffee, boys?" She said.

"Please, Dina," Richie said. "I'm begging ya."

"You don't have to beg, Rich, you just have to not dine and dash on my shift," she said.

Richie lifted his head off the table and gave her his most beatific smile, eyes shiny and huge behind his glasses.

"When have I ever done a thing like that?" He said.

"Uh huh," Dina said. "You want anything to eat?"

"Pancakes," Richie said. "Por favour. And bacon. Don't tell your dad, Stan." He lay his head back down on the tabletop with an audible thunk when his forehead hit the wood.

"Just toast, thanks," Stan said. "You're going to hell, Richie."

"We're Jews, not Catholics."

"Uh," was as far as Eddie got, before Richie interrupted without lifting his face from the table.

"He wants pancakes too," he said.

"You don't get to pick for me," Eddie said. Richie moved his head so it was on the side, looking up at Eddie out of the corner of his eye.

"Tell me that I'm wrong," he said.

Eddie couldn't. They got three coffees and two orders of pancakes (plus toast). While they waited for the food, Stan stared out of the window at the wide, empty streets. The diner was fairly busy that morning, the usual regulars set up, faces that Eddie knew well from school or just from a lifetime of being in the town. A couple of people he'd had classes with; the sibling of someone else he knew; a guy who worked at the mechanics in town, the one who had worked with his father and always had a softness in his eyes for Eddie that Eddie didn't know where to put; the woman who worked at the hair salon his mother frequented. Eddie thought about how in a couple of months he would never see any of these people again. Would they remember him? He thought it unlikely. Perhaps with some prompting they might recall him, but he would not be someone they thought of fondly, not an active memory that played on their minds. He was preparing to be forgotten.

"My head feels like someone's been jackhammering it for hours _Stan will you stop staring at the gutters._ "

Stan's eyes snapped to Richie, who was now sitting up and glaring at him. Stan frowned back.

"I'm not doing anything," he said.

"You're looking," Richie said. "For IT."

"So?"

"IT's gone."

"Can we talk about something else?" Eddie said.

Richie rolled his eyes and blew a strand of hair out of his face. His hair was always such a mess. Eddie often wished he could fix it. Comb the strands out of his eyes. Run a hand over his face and put him right.

"I just think it's worth keeping out eyes out," Stan said. "Mike's right. Even if IT's not back yet, IT'll be back eventually."

"And we'll all be 5,000 miles away from here, so who cares?" Richie said.

"I don't think you know where New York is," Eddie said.

"Sure I do. It's right on the corner of _fuck yourself Kaspbrak_ alley."

Eddie flipped him off but hid it quickly as Dina brought over their coffees. Richie started dumping what looked like an entire fistful of sugar into his immediately. Stan watched with a mixture of mild disgust and curiosity. Eddie knew that the minute the pancakes were brought over that Richie would have no problem ladling some of the maple syrup into his coffee as well. He disgusted Eddie, sometimes. A lot of the time, actually. It was a wonder that Eddie could bear to look at him.

Stan sipped his (black, unsweetened) coffee and looked straight ahead instead of out at the road, where the manholes sat like little warning flags. Eddie found his eyes slipping out to the street but it was easy to remain focused on Richie when Richie was doing so much to retain focus. At that point he was lying back against the seat and talking very quickly with a lot of hand gestures about his recent encounter with Officer Nell, a local cop who was old enough to be someone's granddad and spent most of his time walking the streets scolding local youths for skateboarding. He was a frequent antagonist of Richie's, sometimes because of the minor acts of vandalism all of the Losers were guilty of, sometimes because of the aforementioned skating issue, sometimes because of Richie's recurrent shoplifting habit.

In this story, Nell was giving Richie a hard time for parking his car too close to the sidewalk.

"I mean, what the fuck does he care, right?" Richie said. "It's not like I fuckin' hit anyone, but the way he goes 'Tozier, my boy, the streets are public property, not your property' and it's like, they're not _your_ property either."

He blew the strand of hair out of his eyes again. Eddie's hands itched to tuck it behind his ear.

"Nell doesn't have an Irish accent like that," Stan said. "You make him sound like he just stepped out of a Lucky Charms commercial."

"I'm working on it," Richie said. "It's hard enough getting the accent right in the first place, the way you gotta make it sound like he's been living in Maine for forty years too? It's complicated."

"If you don't get that too, though, it's not really his voice. It's just a stereotype."

"He's a fuckin' stereotype, why do we have an actual Irish cop in Derry."

"Jeeze, Rich, ever heard of immigration?"

"No, I thought everyone was born and died in their own hometown."

"I hope not," Eddie said, grimly, as Dina put their food down in front of them.

"Tell me about it," Richie said. He started pouring syrup from the little pot provided directly onto the pancakes and the bacon and then, like Eddie had predicted, into his coffee. Stan watched with a look of deep disappointment.

Eddie couldn't wait to leave. He was counting the days until he got to pack his suitcases and drive out of Derry for the last time. It was taking him a lot to not pack up early and just get out of here, leave the town in the dust as he took off for the hills, never to return. He was intending to drive to New York, so he could feel every mile he was putting between his new home and his old one, so he could really understand the distance, how far he was, how safe he was from it. So he could forget the way this place got under your skin.

He crammed a forkful of pancakes into his mouth. What a life it would be, to be able to get up every day and know that Derry's stink wasn't on him. That he would be able to walk the streets and not see someone who bullied him in high school walking right towards him. That he could be in a place where people had futures and ambitions beyond what a dead-end town like this would allow him. He had been dreaming of it, fiercely, since he was 12 years old.

Richie picked up a piece of syrup-coated bacon with his hand and tore it in half. He offered half to Eddie.

"Don't be disgusting," Eddie said, and took it.

"You love it," Richie said, winking at him. The skin behind Eddie's ears burned.

Stan ate his toast in silence. For a little while, there was a modicum of peace. The aching behind Eddie's eyes was starting to lessen, a little bit.

"What if Mike's right?" Stan said. "No, really. What if he's right? And IT's back?"

"Until it kills another one of our brothers, I don't care," Richie said. "And would you look at that? We're fresh out of little brothers. I don't care if IT eats Ilana. She probably tastes terrible anyway. Like fuckin' kale."

"You don't mean that," Eddie said.

"You're right, she probably tastes more like cabbage."

"No, idiot. You won't just leave IT running around, killing people. I know you won't."

"What am I, kill a clown cleaning service?"

"Yes," Stan said. "And kale is a kind of cabbage."

Richie sighed theatrically, the full force of his body going into it. He was about to say something else, presumably something catty and stupid, but it was at that moment they heard heavy footsteps approaching their table and the look of smug stubbornness melted off Richie's face and was replaced with a look of genuine fear. Eddie and Stan both turned and looked over.

Alvin Marsh was standing just behind their seats, looking at the three of them. He stank, and his face was so deathly gaunt that there barely seemed to be any flesh left on his skull at all, just pale, sweaty skin and hateful, beady little eyes. There was a scar on the back of his head, under his thinning hair, and it made Eddie's heart surge with pride every time he saw it. Alvin Marsh smacked his lips. There was something grey and unpleasantly slimy about them, and Eddie felt suddenly queasy looking at him.

"You're the boys," he said. "The ones who fucked around with my Bevvie."

Other people in the diner were looking at them. Stan was shrinking in his seat, turning his head away like if he didn't look directly at Alvin he ceased to exist. Eddie was rigid in his seat and Richie was slumping against the back of the chair, arms crossed defensively over his chest, like he was waiting for the moment to give a nonchalant sarcastic remark, but Eddie could recognise the genuine fear in his eyes.

Alvin was swaying slightly as he took another heavy step forward, boots clunking on the tile.

"I always see you running around. Like you own the whole goddamn world. Think you're kings of the town, don't you? That you can just fuck up a man's life and get away with it?" He kept leaning in closer, Stan sliding up the chair closer to Eddie in a bid to get away from him.

Eddie wished he could lunge across the seat and smash a plate over Alvin Marsh's head. He wished he could throw the salt shaker in his eyes and throw the knives into his heart.

But all he could do was sit in his seat and stare back as Alvin's eyes, an unhealthy bloodshot grey, wandered from Richie's face to Eddie's.

"You feel good about what you did?" He said. "Turning my girl into some kind of rotten little whore? Do you?"

He was speaking directly to Eddie then, for reasons that Eddie could not possibly even begin to understand, for some cause that only existed in the misfiring neurons that powered the rotten sack of shit Alvin Marsh had for a brain.

"You walk around all smug, on your high horse. You ruined my life and hers, you nasty little punk. You happy you ruined a good man's life? That you took away his family?"

Eddie wanted this to be over. He felt sick to his stomach, and all he could do was faintly shake his head, praying for this moment to end and for the earth to swallow him up, whichever came first. He wanted to stab a fork right into Alvin Marsh's brain until he stopped moving, but all Eddie could do was sit there with his mouth hanging open and sweat through his polo shirt.

"Yeah, I feel fuckin' great about it," Richie said.

Alvin's attention was directed away from Eddie, skull twisting on his shoulders with a horrible slowness that reminded Eddie very strongly of the dinosaurs of _Jurassic Park,_ with their plastic skin and rattling eyes. 

"What did you say to me, boy?" He said.

"I said it feels great knowing Bev fucking hates you and is never going to see your rotten carcass again," Richie spat. "You wino dirtbag fuck-up."

"Richie," Stan hissed through his teeth.

"The fuck did you say to me?" Alvin roared, but he didn't get much further, because Howie who owned the diner had appeared with one of the cooks and was grabbing Alvin by the back of his jacket, pulling him away from the table.

Alvin fought against them as the two men dragged him towards the door, but there wasn't much strength left in his wiry limbs anymore, and he couldn't break away before he got ejected out onto the street. He shot a look at the diner over his shoulder, yelled something that Eddie couldn't hear at Howie and the cook before he stormed off down the road and out of sight. He stumbled when he walked, and something crawling in Eddie's spine reminded him grimly of the way the leper had lurched and shambled.

Eddie's stomach churned. He'd lost his appetite all of a sudden. Richie rubbed the back of his neck and didn't meet either Eddie or Stan's eyes.

"You shouldn't have..." Eddie started to say to Richie, before Stan put a hand on his arm and shook his head. The words died in Eddie's throat and he gave up on them.

When they were sure Alvin was gone they left their half-eaten plates of food. Eddie drove Stan back home but Richie didn't want to go back to his house so Eddie drove them both out to the quarry. Neither of them felt like swimming, and they ended up lying on the rock at the top of the cliff, using Richie's jacket as a cushion again. It was quiet enough there that Eddie could make himself stop believing that anything was going on. If it was this peaceful here then maybe nothing was wrong.

Even back in that summer they'd had their moments. It wasn't like it had always been terrible... But things rarely were. In between the memories of darkness and fear he had times he held onto. The clubhouse, the cinema, fighting with Richie, the feel of riding free and wild on their bikes. Sometimes Eddie almost wanted to believe that the things they'd all been through hadn't happened at all, and sometimes he could really convince himself they hadn't. Children had very active imaginations, after all, and things that seemed incredibly, terribly important when you were young stopped feeling important much sooner. He could remember being seven or eight and thinking that the whole world was going to end if he didn't get a bike that could keep up with the others. The existence of training wheels had felt potentially life-ruining. Now he had a car and had spent years of his life riding on the back of Richie or Bill's bikes, it barely felt important at all.

If it wasn't for the others, it would be frighteningly easy to forget what had happened. Thankfully he had the scar on his hand, too, a reminder etched into him. And on top of that — he didn't think he could ever _really_ forget Derry, not when it was built into him the way that it was. He couldn't forget this place the way he couldn't forget Keene telling him that his inhalers were full of water, or the feel of his arm breaking in two, or watching Richie pull that baseball bat from the pile of junk and declare that the Losers Club were not going to let Bill go as any kind of willing sacrifice. Those things were all built into Eddie Kaspbrak's DNA; he would remember them no matter what, he was sure, the way he _remembered_ his bones and the skin on them, the way he knew himself.

Their heads were touching as they lay back, looking at the sky. It was so bright and clear that there was no telling what time it was or how much had passed, not able to track moving clouds or shadows on the horizon. It was a perfect day.

Eddie thought about how last time Richie had said he wouldn't fight the clown either, but he'd still been the first to follow Bill when Bev was in trouble, and the first to move when Pennywise had tried to take Bill. Eddie ran a finger over the prominent bones in the back of Richie's hand, the structures there that stood out a mile. Richie looked at him out of the corner of his eye.

"What?" Richie said.

"Nothing," Eddie said. Mike and Bill were their leaders, as bizarre as it was to have leaders in a group of friends, but he felt certain that if Richie decided he wanted to do something about IT the others would follow suit. He wasn't the brains of the group, but he was the heart, maybe.

Eddie wondered what he was. Not the brains or the heart, certainly not the spine. Just a hanger-on, maybe. That was fine, though. At least this group was something worth clinging onto. The only thing worth hanging onto in all of Derry. Certainly the only thing he was going to miss. Richie, lying beside him, lit a cigarette. Eddie waved the smoke away from his eyes and, childishly, Richie blew it closer to his face.

"Secondhand smoke is deadly," he said.

"At least we'll die together," Richie said.


	3. 2: The Last Party of Derry High

Eddie wasn't avoiding Mike and Bill, as such, but he was definitely reluctant to go running to see them again. He didn't want to hear more  _ news _ about what Mike had been seeing. So, he stayed clear, for a couple of days. Partially it was coincidence, but when Ben suggested going to Bill's house a couple of days later, it was Eddie who peeled off from the group. He wondered if he was being a coward again, but he didn't want to stop and check in with everyone else if he was still a fucking loser. Not even the good kind.

The summer stretching on before them seemed bright and clean and perfect. He was supposed to be packing for when he would leave for New York in a couple of months; it was too early to move, but he wanted to be sure he was ready, that he had everything he needed. He had a lot of things he needed to do before he left; not just packing, but getting rid of a lot of childish things, that he would have to replace then, with things more appropriate of a boy on his way to college. He was eighteen years old, nineteen soon, and he wasn't going to be at college with his fucking little-boy pyjamas and too-small T-shirts, the things his mother refused to let him get rid of. He knew what she was doing when she pulled the polo shirt he'd bought when he was fourteen out of a box and held it up in front of him and insisted it still fit. He wasn't stupid, as much as she'd like to believe he was naive.

He'd taken on a job to afford the replacement things he was going to need, and to pay for his car. He worked most weekends at a car dealership at town, and was working more now that it was summer. Saving up. All he did was some data entry, but he knew the computers better than the owner Larry did, and Larry was always oddly more grateful than he needed to be. Eddie knew why, of course. Larry had been another friend of his father's. It was probably — no, definitely — why Eddie had gotten the job there. Larry wanted to feel like he was doing something for Frank.

Eddie never knew if he should feel touched by that, or if he should feel bad that he was being chosen out of sympathy for a man he didn't even remember, so he chose to just be happy he had a job with a boss he kind of liked and made sure to come into work on time. He was also grateful he didn't have to be out on the salesroom floor, because he knew damn well he would be fucking terrible at it. He didn't have that kind of charisma.

Richie had applied for a job there, as a salesman, and Eddie had thought he had a good chance at getting it. He had the charm and the patter. Eddie would buy a car from him. But in the end he hadn't gotten it. Eddie didn't really know why, just that Larry had smiled stiffly and said that he preferred to have people who were 'one of the guys' on the team. Eddie wasn't really sure what that meant, but he hadn't passed that along to Richie.

It was another hot afternoon when Eddie was sitting in the office. He was going over some numbers that had to be transferred from paper to the dealership's state of the art computers and he was typing away without much on his mind except that he was sure the computer experience would look good on his resume when he started looking for internships in New York. Should he already have been looking for internships? He was sure a lot of rich kids got internships at big financial companies straight out of high school, but Eddie's family wasn't rich and didn't have connections. He couldn't spend a summer paying rent in New York and not working because he was fetching coffee from 9-5 for someone who could buy his childhood home with a week's wages.

Eddie was mulling over this when he glanced up and noticed a figure through the window of the office door. He blinked but the figure didn't move. The office Eddie was in wasn't open to the public; it was slightly out of the way, around the corner from the offices the salesmen occupied, near the staff kitchen. He sat and stared out the slightly frosted glass of the window at the shape that was standing in the hall motionlessly and waited for them to either walk to the kitchen or open the door of the office. It was probably Larry, right? Or one of the other salesmen, Dave or Roger or...

The figure stayed still. Eddie's typing slowed and gradually stopped. It was swaying slightly, he noticed, as though struggling to hold itself up. A cold chill ran down his spine as he thought about Alvin Marsh lurching down the street on his unsteady feet. It wasn't possible that it could be him, right? How would he know where Eddie worked?

The issue was, though, that it was very possible. All he would have to do would be to mention  _ the Kaspbraks _ or  _ that Kaspbrak boy _ to the right person, and he'd get an answer. It was Derry. It was a small town. Then all he'd have to do would be to show up at the right time.

When the clown had started killing kids, IT didn't always do its own dirty work. IT made other people do things. Dorsey Corcoran had been killed by his own father.

Eddie's heart was starting to thump in his chest. He thought, instinctively, of his inhaler, but he hadn't carried it with him since he was thirteen. He still had it back in his room, shoved in the back of a drawer. He'd never been able to bring himself to get rid of it completely, for reasons he couldn't really articulate, though he'd forced himself to hide it. When he remembered it was there he felt oddly ashamed, like he was letting someone down. Who exactly, he didn't know. Maybe whoever that kid had been who'd thrown it away in the first place.

The figure swayed a little, almost like it was going to collapse, but it was moving away from the door. On shaking legs, Eddie slowly rose out of his seat. He didn't  _ need _ to look. If he stayed where he sat then he could wait until Larry or someone else came along and told whoever it was to get out of the employees only area and then he'd be fine.

But there was a part of Eddie that wasn't going to let him just sit there and let it go away without knowing, exactly, what it was. He didn't really think about what he was doing, just moved, powered perhaps by the same sickly curiosity that made him read books on disease even when he knew how much it would upset him. He crept across the room, over the worn and threadbare carpet and cracked the door open so slowly and quietly that he could barely hear it himself.

Out in the hallway was a man, shuffling away from the door. He was maybe average height, and he had black hair. He was wearing a dark jacket with the sleeves rolled up. He was slumped and the bare skin of his arms was pale, covered in sparse dark hair. From the angle he was at, Eddie couldn't see his face at all.

The man stopped when the door began to open. Eddie froze in his place, staring at him. There was something familiar about the man, but he wasn't sure what, exactly. Something about the clothes he was wearing, the way his hair was slicked back against his skull. The curve of his arm and wrist. Something about it all was pushing some button in the back of Eddie's mind that he hadn't realised was there to be pushed.

The man started to turn slightly; the light caught his profile, the thick eyebrows, dark eyes, the slight bump of his nose. He had an almost sunken look to his eyes and he... He looked...

Sad?

"Eddie?"

Eddie turned to see Larry standing in the doorway to the kitchen to his left, looking mildly bemused.

"Everything alright?" Larry said.

When Eddie looked back the hallway was empty. He swallowed hard.

"Yeah, I just thought I saw someone back here?" He said. "Like a customer?"

Larry made a face like he was thinking about it.

"Huh, didn't see anyone," he said. "You need anything? Water?"

"I'm alright," Eddie said, though his hand was shaking so much now it was making the doorknob rattle. "I'm fine."

It was that moment that pushed him to go and see Mike and Bill again. He drove home from work later almost blindly, operating on instinct more than on thought. The figure had not gone for him. That fact was the one thing that kept playing in his mind over and over. The leper, when he'd seen it, had both mocked him and chased after him, ridiculing him, lurching after him with its horrible hands and its threat of disease. The man in the hallway had only looked at him.

He had called Mike immediately when he got home, since his mother wasn't there. If she was she might have listened in or, worse, picked up the extension in her bedroom and spied. She'd done that so many times now that the others rarely called Eddie if they wanted to tell him something that they knew his mother wouldn't like, which was more or less anything at all.

Mike's grandma picked up and told him that Mike and Bill were out in the field fixing broken fences. She always talked about them both with a degree of pride in her voice that made Eddie think she thought of Bill as her grandson as much as she did Mike, and in a way that always made Eddie distinctly, pettily jealous. She told him they'd be done in maybe half an hour, but he didn't want to risk them calling when his mother was back, so he told her he'd drive over to see them. She asked him if he'd like to stay for dinner and he said he did. He rarely gave up an opportunity to eat outside of the house.

He left and drove to Mike's family farm with the window of his car rolled down. He had a picture of himself in the back of his mind driving to New York like this, with the windows down and the sun beating down on them, getting a tan on his arm...

_ Them? _ He shook his head and reminded himself that he was leaving for New York alone.

Mike and Bill were back at the house by the time Eddie got there. Bill had giant mud stains on his knees and was laughing about something with Mike, who was sitting on the porch and looking up at him with a huge grin on his face. Eddie felt almost guilty when he walked up the path to the house and interrupted them. It was impossible for him not to notice the difference between the way Bill looked at Mike and looked at him; it was like the difference in how someone would look at a nightlight and how they'd look at the sun.

"Hey, Eddie," Mike said. "Gran'ma said you called."

"Yeah," Eddie said. "I, uh..."

"You ok?" Bill said.

In the early evening sunlight, both Bill and Mike seemed to glow. They had been hard at work for a long time, no doubt, but they were comfortable in their tiredness and in the sense that they'd done a hard job well. What was it Bill liked about this? Mike had to do it all for his family, but Bill didn't  _ have  _ to be here. Was it just the money? The gratification of completing a job? Was it spending time with Mike?

How much time did Bill have left to spend with Mike, after all?

"I saw something too," Eddie said. "I think."

Both Bill and Mike's faces went immediately grave and Eddie felt a tug of guilt in his gut. Mike had been the first one of them to see something, but ratifying his beliefs still felt like it was burdening the two of them with unnecessary knowledge, something they could have lived peacefully without having to know.

The backdoor to the porch opened and Mike's grandfather stood there. He was a stoic man, blunt, someone you didn't fuck around with. He wasn't much like Mike, who had been known on occasion to become so emotionally overwhelmed by little gestures he started to cry, but he had something of Mike in him, or perhaps the other way around. It was the way in which they both would do anything they had to and not complain, so long as they knew it was making someone they loved safer. It was in the way they would both decide what the best thing to do was and stubbornly stick to it, sometimes without asking first. It was in the way they seemed unclear on what exactly it was they were supposed to do with love other than treat it as something that could be taken from them at any time.

"Dinner's ready," the old man said. "You coming too?"

"Yes, sir," Eddie said.

Grandpa Hanlon jerked his head towards Eddie and raised his eyebrows at Bill.

"That one still has nice manners," he said.

Bill cracked a smile. "He couldn't shear a sheep for shit, though."

Grandpa Hanlon smiled back before he went inside, the screen door rattling as he let it swing shut. Mike stood up and brushed dirt off his pants.

"You can tell us about it after we eat," he said.

There was plenty of food to go around. Eddie had eaten with the Hanlons more times than he could count. Mike himself was less a lousy cook and more just someone with profoundly odd tastes in food, but his grandparents thankfully knew their way around the kitchen, which was good for Eddie because his mother viewed food as something that was to be doled out in very specific increments, the amount of which was known only to her. She was very worried both about him getting fat, and about him not eating enough, and about him eating food that she deemed 'unhealthy', not to mention the allergies on top of it all. At the Hanlons', Eddie ate lamb and potatoes and was happy for it.

Mike and Bill sat side by side and communicated in knowing glances. When you spent enough time with someone you knew things, both things that were only funny to you and things that had so much loaded history that they were impossible to explain. It felt odd that even inside the Losers Club there could be secrets between friends, but of course there were. Eddie and Richie didn't talk about all the times they spent in Eddie's room in the middle of the night, talking about things only they understood, and Mike and Bill didn't explain why exactly Mike had to cover his mouth and look away to stop himself from laughing when Bill started cutting his cutlet into microscopic slices.  _ In-joke. _ Grandma Hanlon told Bill to stop playing with his food.

They went to Mike's room afterwards. The sun was low in the sky and the fields where the sheep grazed looked stubbly and golden, drying out in the summer heat. Mike's room was small and flooded with books. The walls were painted a sparse white, and were mostly bare, outside of a few photographs he had framed and hung in neat spots. His parents smiled down at him from over his desk, a group shot of the Losers pulled faced over his bed. He sat at his desk while Bill flopped on the bed.

"You're getting mud on the sheets," Mike said.

"Oh, like these sheets haven't had mud on them before," Bill said.

"You don't have to wash them," Mike said. "Or have my grandpa yell at you for them."

"Your grandpa yells at me plenty."

"Cus you ask for it."

Eddie sat on a stack of books. It swayed a little but remained solid. Mike stopped sniping at Bill and turned to look at him, his face shifting back into something grave.

"What did you see?" He said, something authoritative and experienced taking over.

"I was at work," Eddie said. "And there was a man in the hallway. I thought... I don't know. At first I thought he was real but then when I looked at him, I thought I knew him."

"Knew him how?" Bill said.

"Like... I recognised him. But it wasn't... I mean, it wasn't the leper, or the fucking clown, or Richie's werewolf. It was like a middle-aged guy, and he looked kinda familiar.”

Mike frowned.

"What did it do?" He said.

"Nothing," Eddie said. "I looked away for a minute, then he was gone."

The small room was stiflingly hot even with the window open. Eddie tugged at the collar of his shirt. He wore a button-up shirt to work. He liked how adult it made him feel.

"If it was IT..." Bill said.

"IT never just checked in with us," Mike said. "Even at the start, before we knew what IT was, IT was trying to make us afraid."

"Have you found anything?" Eddie said. "Missing kids?"

Bill shook his head.

"But what... What else is going to make someone appear? Ghosts?" Eddie said.

"It could be ghosts," Mike said.

"It's not  _ ghosts," _ Eddie said.

"Oh, so ghosts are too far now?"

"Oh my God. This isn't the point. We need to... Do we need to do something?"

"Of course we do," Bill said. "We can't just leave IT, if it's really back. Can't just say it's someone else's problem. We made a promise."

"I thought we had longer," Eddie said. "I thought you said like, thirty years. It's been barely five."

"Time flies," Mike said.

Time did not fly. Eddie drove home after that, not feeling particularly comforted by the discussion. If IT was back, there would be more obvious signs of IT being back. IT did not just sit around and taunt them, even when IT had known they were hunting IT, even when they'd declared war. IT had focused on them, but IT was a greedy beast and the souls of the seven Losers were not enough. Right up until the end IT had been scavenging for as many as it could. Eddie knew IT had been the one who had made Henry Bowers kill his father and his friends. If IT was back now, IT wasn't going to just be satisfied with taunting them before going back to the long slumber between feeding frenzies. Eddie could hear Richie in his head then,  _ what are we, like a midnight snack? _

When he got back to the house his mother was in a hysteria. He'd left a note saying he was going out, but this, apparently, had not been enough for her.

"You shouldn't be driving out in the dark!" She wailed.

"It's barely seven PM, Mom," he said.

"How are you ever going to survive at college if you can't be more mature?" She sobbed.

He wanted to excuse himself from the conversation but there was no safe spot in the house where she wouldn't follow him, weeping and wailing, snapping and snarling at him, cruel words hidden under sickening layers of concern, all designed to try and keep him trapped. It was easier to just sit and listen and wait for her to stop on her own time. He was pretty good at zoning out when she got going these days, pretty good at reaching the place inside of himself that she couldn't touch. She could plead and beg all she wanted, but Eddie knew himself better than she did. There was a private spite he held in himself, thinking of how much she didn’t know.

Something came knocking in the middle of the night. Eddie knew immediately it was Richie; there was a rustling outside his house and a rap at the window that lurched him out of sleep. Many people, even people who had never been given reason to fear for their lives, would have a dark part of their mind that said  _ the monsters are here,  _ that worried the thing at their door was going to bring a new pain they didn't know into their naive life. But Eddie knew where the monsters were, and they didn't crawl in through his bedroom window at night.

He swung himself out of bed, the book on incidents of planes going missing (a gift from Bill, naturally) sliding off his chest and hitting the floor with a clunk when he moved. He froze for a second to listen out for if his mom had heard, but there was nothing in the house to suggest she had. He walked over to the window and yanked it open, found Richie wheezing and clinging half to the wall and half to the windowsill. He helped pull Richie in.

“Don’t make it easy on me,” Richie said. He was wearing clothes that looked new; straight-legged jeans and a Greenday band shirt that still had creases from the packaging.

“I didn’t have to help,” Eddie said. “What are you doing here?”

“Breaking you out,” Richie said. He flung himself onto Eddie’s bed and stretched out. Sometimes it really surprised Eddie how tall he was; Richie had a tendency to hunch up so much you could completely forget how big he’d gotten and seeing him at his full height always took Eddie aback.

“Where are we going?” Eddie said. 

“Walt Emmett is having a party.”

“Walt fucking hates us. You punched him in the face. Also he’s fucking gross.”

“One, he has a huge house, two everyone is going so we won’t even have to talk to him, three, he hates  _ Ben,  _ not us. I just hit him, Ben’s the one who broke his nose.”

“We should hate him on principle.” 

"We  _ do." _ Richie sighed theatrically. “This is just about drinking his booze, Eddie.”

He sat up again, bouncing on the bed a little.

“You’ll have to put some clothes on,” he said.

Eddie looked down at himself. He was wearing brown check pyjama pants and a T-shirt from a school science fair.

“Why, is this not cool enough?” He said.

“Come onnn, do you wanna come or not? It’s  _ summer.” _

“Alright, fucking… Let me put some clothes on.”

Richie whooped and then slapped a hand over his mouth, eyeballs huge and staring at the wall as if Sonia Kaspbrak was going to materialise through it like one of Mike’s hypothetical ghosts. They both hesitated, but there was no sound from the other side of the house. Eddie still didn’t relax as he grabbed a pair of slacks out of his drawers, kicking off his pyjamas as Richie put a pillow over his face in a theatrical show of giving him privacy. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen Eddie shirtless before, but Richie had become increasingly uncomfortable about boundaries as they got older. He swam with a shirt on these days.

“This is going to be so lame,” Eddie said. 

“If it’s lame we’ll leave,” Richie said, muffled through the pillow. 

“You can take the cushion off now,” Eddie said. “Why do you even want to go, anyway?”

“Uh, because I don’t want to spend my entire fucking summer sober and worrying about the fucking clown just because Mike was high.” 

“That’s kinda fucked up, Richie. I think he really did see something. I think I did too.”

Richie glared but didn’t respond, just rolled his eyes and jumped off the bed. 

They left the house via the more traditional route; Eddie had never loved the act of climbing out of his own window, even though he’d done it more than a few times. It still made him kind of nervous, the possibility of the woodwork separating from the wall or his arms giving out far too vividly possible, even though he knew he was as strong as Richie, if not stronger. It was just less trouble to sneak down the stairs, both of them avoiding the sixth step down, the one they knew creaked, and made their way out of the front door, delicately closing it behind them.

Outside in the summer night Eddie felt immediately energised by the big open sky and the warm breeze that was rolling down the street. He could see a lot of stars that night. He took it as a good omen.

“Who else are we picking up?” Eddie said.

“Uh, no one,” Richie said. “That ok?”

“Is what ok?”

“That it’s just us hanging out.”

“Yeah, Rich, I think that’s ok.”

There was that smile, with the teeth and the slightly squinty eye. Eddie’s stomach did cartwheels.

It was not that far of a walk to Walt Emmett’s house, and the nice was night, so Eddie didn’t offer to drive them. They used to walk everywhere in Derry, and there was something nostalgic about ambling down the street with Richie, doing something they both knew they shouldn’t. Then again, Eddie reasoned with himself, there was no real reason  _ why  _ they shouldn’t. They were adults, they could go out if they wanted to. When he was in college there’d probably be dozens of nights when they would be out doing exactly this; Ilana had given them the impression college was  _ mostly _ this. 

“How’s Ilana?” Eddie said.

“Why?” Richie said. “You still got that crush on her?”

“I never had a crush on her, Richie. Stop being weird.”

“She’s fine. She’s got a boyfriend though, just so you know.”

“Is she still thinking about moving to LA?” 

“Uh, yeah. Yeah I think she’s going to do it. She’s got like, some friends, or something.”

Richie glanced at him and then away. He scratched the back of his head nervously, but he didn’t add anything else to that. 

“Why don’t you go with her?” Eddie pushed.

“You trying to get rid of me, Eds?” Richie said. “You want me on the other side of the country?”

“Yeah, you’d be less annoying then,” Eddie said. They both laughed, but Richie’s face was tight. 

Los Angeles was 2,797 miles away from New York City, give or take a little depending on what route you took. It was over two days on a Greyhound, or maybe six hours on a plane, or over forty in a car. You would have to ride I70 through most of the midwest, navigate thousands of miles of roads, cities, and desert. You would have to get around the vast emptiness of the countryside, see how few people lived in the vast United States. It would be a longer drive than the one Eddie was taking soon, from Derry to New York City. One of the longest journeys you could take across the US. A straight shot from one ocean to the other. You could lose yourself, in a journey like that. All the time and space, you could lose something.

It was a good thing Eddie was so good with finding his way, he thought. 

Richie was bouncing on his heels as he walked, swinging his arms. Eddie had to pick up the pace to keep up with him, but he didn’t mind. Rushing like this worked well with how much everything was always rattling around inside his own skull. 

By the time they were on the street Walt lived on it was obvious where the party was; Eddie was not going to be surprised if someone ended up calling the cops on them before the night was out. He entertained the possibilities of running from the police with Richie. It would be a new experience. 

There was no real obstacle to getting inside; the door was open, a couple of people that they knew sitting on the porch, listening to Aerosmith leaking out of the front room. Eddie knew most of the kids out front by sight (that was Marty Rogers who had been on the track and field team, he was with his girlfriend Rose, there was her friend with the red hair who was the first person to get braces in their year) but he was happy to leave with a nod hello. Richie wasn't. He stopped dead on the stairs up to the porch instead.

"What, you guys had enough?" He said.

"We're just having a smoke," Rose said, raising an eyebrow. 

“Anything crazy happening?” Richie pushed.

“Not really.”

“Guess that’s gonna change now I’m here.”

“Sure, Richie,” Marty said. “Hey, Eddie. Heard you got into NYU. My brother went there.”

“Yeah?” Eddie said. “He like it?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“You not going there?”

“No, I signed up man. Marines. Wanna do something useful, y’know?”

“Sure,” Richie said. 

“Heard you got into some kinda fuckin’...  _ Arts _ school, Tozier,” Marty said. ‘Arts’ sounded loaded. 

“No?” Richie said. “Come on, Eddie.”

He lurched into the house, clearly done with the people on the porch. The three of them looked at each other and burst into laughter as Eddie followed Richie inside, his ears burning.

The occupants of the party were mostly people from school, some outsiders, but not many. It was all the kind of people that the Losers Club had stringently avoided throughout most of middle and high school, but that popularity contest shit had already started to become less and less important, even only a few months out of school. Something about the separation and the fact that for many of them these were going to be the last few times they ever saw each other softened some of the rivalries that used to make school such a miserable experience. Walt saw them across the room and raised a beer bottle in hello, but didn’t start anything. There were a few people around dancing to the blaring music while others sat on the slouchy sofas in a circle in the middle of the living room.

Richie, for some fucking reason, made a beeline for Walt. Eddie hung back a little but couldn’t  _ not  _ follow Richie, trailing behind him and gritting his teeth against the conversation that was about to happen. 

“Hey, hey, Walt,” Richie said.

“What?” Walt said, voice already uninterested. 

He was surrounded by his usual posse of friends. Eddie wondered if any of them were stressed about the fact they might never see each other again, or if they were another group only held together by proximity, who were likely to forget each other as soon as they were settled in wherever they moved onto or when the others had left their lives. They all looked at Richie approaching them like he was something that had just crawled out of the swamp.

“This the kind of music you play here? Is there going to be anything from after 1975, or is the music exclusively picked out by your dad?” Richie said.

Walt stared at him blankly, looking at his friends in confusion. He shrugged.

“Whatever. What do you want?”

“Nothing, just wondering if it’s going to kick off here at all. You even got anything here to drink?”

“Yeah, there’s stuff on the drinks cabinet. Can you at least try not to vomit everywhere this time, Trashmouth?” Walt’s tone suggested he really strongly wanted the conversation to be done, so Eddie grabbed Richie by the arm and pulled him back.

“Let’s get something to drink, Richie,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, you two run along,” one of Walt’s friends said. The others laughed. Richie looked like he was going to say something else, but Eddie hauled him away before he could, starting to regret this already.

There were a couple more people (Robbie who was in Eddie’s American history class, that girl who had sung the national anthem at assembly one time, Kevin who worked at the cinema, Betty Ripsom’s younger sister who lead the cheer squad) waiting by the drinks cabinet, pouring themselves vodka out of a large glass bottle and laughing about it. Richie elbowed past them to get to the bottles of beer on one side of the cabinet. He made some joke about shoving his way into a private party, but no one seemed to get it. Eddie was fairly certain it was a long walk towards the idea of having an orgy, but he didn’t help clarify the meaning.

Richie handed him a beer, which Eddie was grateful for just because it meant he had something to do other than stand slightly to the side. Robbie gave him a nod hello.

“Hey, Ed,” Robbie said. “How’s it going?”

“Ok, how are you?”

“Not bad. Packing for school mostly. Gonna drive down to Florida with Nick next week.”

“Long journey. I’m just driving to New York.”

“Oh, that’s cool.” Robbie glanced at Richie. “You’re going to New York too, right? I heard you were doing like, drama? Or something?”

“No,” Richie said. He turned away abruptly, cutting off the conversation. Robbie didn’t look too upset about this, drifting off into his own corner of society.

“You know we could have gotten drunk anywhere,” Eddie said to Richie. 

“No, getting drunk on your own is sad,” Richie said. “Getting drunk at a party is cool.”

“You wish you were cool.”

“I’m cooler than you’ll ever be.”

“No you’re not. You just pretend you are. What have you ever done that’s cool?”

They were interrupted. 

“You two are always like this, huh?” The intruder was Sue Greenfield, another person whose dislike of them in middle school had gradually cooled off over the years to acceptance. She had primarily disliked Beverly, had been Eddie’s understanding, but with Bev gone and the fact Sue no longer hung around with Greta Keene, the reason for the dislike had eroded itself. 

“Like what?” Eddie said.

“Like, the fighting,” Sue said.

“My dearest Ms Greenfield, may I do you the honour of pouring you a drink?” Richie said, in the voice of an English butler.

“Mr Tozier, if you could do me the great pleasure of turning around to hand me a bottle of beer, I would sure appreciate it,” Sue said, dryly. She was maybe attempting to do some kind of accent, but it was unclear what exactly. Regardless of the failure, the attempt made Richie laugh wheezily before he theatrically presented her with a bottle. 

“What are you guys doing here? I never saw you around much,” she said. “You were always with like, your own group. Doing your own… Weird things.”

“Last chance, right?” Richie said.

“Yeah.” Sue wistfully looked around the room.

The idea she was sincerely going to miss this place was  _ astonishing _ to Eddie. What different levels of existence they operated on; the idea someone would look at Derry and be  _ sad  _ that they were going sounded absurd to him. It just went to show how two people could have such radically different conceptualisations of a place. Sue might say that despite all its rough edges, Derry was a great place to grow up. You’d never catch any of the Losers even  _ pretending  _ to believe that.

“What are you doing?” Eddie said. “Now that school’s out.”

“Going to Maryland. They have a good computer science programme. You?”

“Oh, I got family in Baltimore. I’m going to New York, though. Statistics.” 

“New York! That’s cool. I don’t think I’m gonna love Baltimore, honestly, it doesn’t sound cool. Maybe I’ll do my time and just get the hell out, y’know? I’m probably gonna be so homesick I bet I end up moving right back here.”

_ Are you fucking insane? _

“What about you? You’re going to do like, drama right? Or something about theatre?” Sue said to Richie, who sighed heavily. 

“No, I got into Maine to do  _ chemistry _ ,” he said. 

“Oh, people were saying, like… Whatever. You’re not going far, then? Homesick?”

“No, fuck no. It was just the only place that would take me. I don’t know if I’m even gonna go, honestly. It seems like a fucking waste of time.”

Sue raised her eyebrows and made a slight face that made it very clear that she thought Richie was crazy. Eddie bit back from saying anything. Richie was throwing his beer back and trying to be casual in a way that felt violently  _ uncasual,  _ drawing a big glowing spotlight on his uncomfortableness. 

“Well, cool seeing you guys before you…” Sue began.

“You know where we can get anything harder?” Richie said.

“What?”

“Like, if anyone’s doing anything.”

“Christ, Tozier, when did you become such a junkie. No, I don’t know. It’s probably not… Like that here, y’know? Like, sometimes there’s weed, but we’re not… Like… Doing coke, or whatever.” Sue flapped her hand vaguely at the kitchen. “Maybe Francis’ blond friend has something, he normally does.”

Richie shrugged, like he wasn’t really that interested. The song had changed, Marky Mark was bellowing to the room about good vibrations, and it grabbed his attention with the suddenness of someone looking for a distraction. He looked at Sue with that same crinkly-eyed smile that moments before had made Eddie’s stomach churn, and he offered her his hand. 

“You wanna dance?” He said.

Sue laughed, surprised, as if it was something audacious. “Sure, whatever.” 

Eddie almost wanted to ask him  _ what the fuck am I meant to do?,  _ but that felt pretty lame, and it didn’t matter anyway. Richie could fuck around. He just rolled his eyes and walked away from the two of them. The music was too loud in there anyway, he thought. Richie could find him if he wanted to do something other than badly gyrate out of time — Eddie knew Richie didn’t know how to fucking dance. 

He spared Sue and Richie a glance over his shoulder as he walked towards the kitchen to see what was going on there. Some absurdist part of him thought it sucked that Richie hadn’t asked him to dance first, but in a way, they  _ had  _ danced first, right? After they’d been kicked out of prom, when they’d gone back to Mike’s, it had been Eddie who Richie had danced with all night. Prom was the one that counted too,  _ everyone  _ knew that. The thought was oddly smug. 

The house was fairly full of people. A lot of kids in Derry with nothing else to do other than drink and sit around and make trouble, bored out of their minds with nothing coming up other than the fact they were leaving and things here were going to soon lose any meaning. Eddie stopped to talk to a couple of people he’d been in class with, but the conversation had the exact same pace of  _ hey, what are you up to? Where are you going to college? Are you looking forward to it? _ He was certain he was going to have the exact same conversation a hundred times throughout the next couple of months, as if he was in the final stages of the game and all the characters had run out of dialogue. Nothing to do but face the boss and then play the next game. Unless you were like Eddie, of course. Then you’d drive Richie batshit doing the exact same shit all over again and never move on. 

Paula Cline who had been in his homeroom shot him a friendly smile and Eddie decided to talk to her because it was better than standing by the wall waiting for Richie to be done and pay attention to him again. God, that was pathetic. What, was he going to spend all of college waiting for Richie to show up too? He needed to get his own fucking life. 

“Hi!” She said. “Haven’t seen you around here much before.”

“No, I guess it’s not really my thing,” Eddie said. 

“You were always kind of nerdy,” Paula said. “Good runner, though. Weren’t you doing some scholarship? Coach Woodleigh said so.”

“Yeah. Yeah, got into NYU.”

“Cool! I’m not going to college, I got a job working at a restaurant in Bangor.”

“Nice. You’re probably going to end up less broke than me.”

“Please, you’re going to end up being one of those crazy Wall Street stockbrokers or something, I know you are. You should have been carrying a briefcase your whole life. I’m probably going to gamble everything on a restaurant and lose it all.”

“You could try insurance fraud.”

“So your insurance company can catch me out? I don’t think so.”

Eddie looked over his shoulder. Richie twirled Sue like a ballet dancer, nearly knocking into about five other people. Eddie frowned. That was supposed to be  _ their  _ move —  _ Jesus, stop being jealous, you’re fucking embarrassing yourself. Why would you be jealous, anyway? Like she’s ever going to be close to Richie the way you are.  _

“Oh my God,” Paula said. “Wow, he always has to be the centre of attention, right?”

Eddie frowned at her. “He’s just dancing.”

“He’s not just dancing. Why’s he bothering with  _ Sue, _ anyway?” 

“What do you mean? What’s wrong with Sue?”

Paula made a face like he was crazy. “There’s nothing wrong with  _ Sue,”  _ she said.

Eddie’s skin crawled. “Well, nice talking to you. Bye.” 

“Oh, bye.”

He turned to the food on the table to see if there was anything he could bear to touch, but the idea of eating the pizza that a bunch of kids had been pawing over all night made him queasy just to think about, and he wasn’t sure he could even eat cheese, so that was out. The chips probably weren’t much better. Actually, they were definitely worse, he didn’t even know when they’d been opened.

He could see Francis Johnson in the kitchen, but Francis was steadfastly ignoring him. Fine, Eddie didn’t want to talk to him either. There was some blond boy that Eddie didn’t recognise with him. The drug friend, maybe. The drug friend was tall and handsome and had curly hair that flopped over his face. He had noticed Eddie, looked at him standing by the table with cool blue eyes. Eddie stared back, slightly confrontationally. The guy shot him an awkward smile.

“Do I know you?” He said.

“No, sorry,” Eddie said. “Sorry, I was just… Uh… Hanging out.”

Blond kid laughed. “It’s cool. You by yourself?”

“No, my friend is just trying to convince everyone he’s John Travolta.”

“And you don’t dance.”

“I do, but not for show.”

The blond kid laughed again. Eddie actually smiled back properly this time. 

“I’m Eddie,” he said. “You didn’t go to Derry High.”

“No, I like, dropped out anyway. School is fucking stupid.”

“It can be. What do you do then?”

He shrugged. “Whatever, you know? I’m a waiter right now, it’s whatever.”

Christ, how reckless. The idea of living your life with that kind of devil-may-care freedom was completely alien to Eddie, who had spent most of his life carefully making sure all the pieces were in place so that he would be able to get the hell out of Derry the only way he knew to be legitimate. He vaguely thought of all the stupid teenage declarations of intent to run away that Richie used to come out with, and how these two would probably get on. Actually, no, they would be terrible for each other.

The song flipped to What is Love. It was so loud it kind of hurt Eddie’s ears a little bit. Haddaway was really belting that fucking song out.

“You don’t have some big dream for the future?” Eddie said, dryly. “Not working on your five year plan?”

“Is that a joke?” He said.

“Feels like everyone else is.”

“Those people are fucking stupid, man. Who fucking knows what’s going to happen in life, right?” There was something slightly delirious about the way he was talking. “Why even bother trying, y’know? Anything could happen.”

Eddie didn’t have a good answer to that. Richie burst into the room at that exact moment, hanging off the doorway to the kitchen like a monkey, his long arms and legs reaching out across the room. He nearly knocked into two people standing too close to the door, but he didn’t notice.

“Eddie!” Richie said. “This is  _ our song!” _

Eddie raised his eyebrow, but then Richie made eye contact with the blond boy, and the mood of the moment changed like the ice on a lake cracking. Richie’s face fell, his eyes wide and Eddie’s entire body jarred into action, sensing the trigger of  _ fuck, Richie’s not ok,  _ and immediately wanting to solve it, to jump in, to do something. He had to help, but he didn’t know what was wrong. Richie shook his head once, twice. The blond boy took a step forward.

“Richie-” 

“We have to go,” Richie said. He grabbed Eddie’s arm and turned sharply to the door, dragging Eddie along with him. They made it through the house and out into the front yard before the stranger caught up to them. 

He touched Richie’s shoulder and Richie turned violently around, shoving him away. Eddie stumbled back a little, watching in alarm.

“Don’t fucking touch me, Connor,” Richie said.

“Richie,” Connor said. “I’m sorry.”

“Fuck you. Stay away from me. Go join your psycho cousin in hell.”

The people sitting on Walt’s front porch were watching curiously, and Richie glanced at them nervously before walking further down the street, out of earshot. Connor followed desperately, and the look on his face was making Eddie really uncomfortable. He stopped dead in his tracks, no longer trailing after Richie.

“What the hell is going on?” Eddie demanded.

Richie stopped on the corner of the street. His entire face was tense, a muscle in his cheek flexing as he tried to find the words to speak. Connor watched with huge, hurt eyes. Despite it, Eddie didn’t feel inclined to be on his side. How could he? If Richie was this angry… 

“Connor is Henry’s fucking cousin,” Richie said. “You know, the guy who tried to fucking  _ kill us.” _

People didn’t really talk about Henry Bowers anymore. He’d not exactly been  _ popular  _ before, had been one of those kids who everyone avoided, and he’d largely wanted to spend time with either his cronies or with people who weren’t in school at all, with older troublemakers who would be able to get him alcohol to drink, gas to huff, whatever shit the Bowers gang would get up to when they weren’t tormenting kids half their size. No one had been sitting around the parties with the upper echelon of Derry High society and wishing Bowers and Hockstetter would crash it. But now, after the murders, he had faded out of the world like a ghost. It was like as soon as he had crossed the town border, before he’d gotten to Juniper Hill even, he no longer existed. Expunged from the town history, no one ever talked about Henry Bowers. Eddie didn’t think he’d heard his name in years. 

Connor flinched when Richie mentioned him. 

“Look,” Connor said. “It wasn’t my fault.”

“You set him on me,” Richie said. “You could have let me leave that summer, but you  _ wanted  _ him to fucking get me. Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

“It wasn’t like that. And I didn’t want him to kill you! I just… You don’t know what it was like having him be your  _ cousin,  _ man.”

“You don’t know what it was like having to watch over your shoulder every day because he might come and kick your ass,” Richie spat. 

“Why did he… What happened?” Eddie said. He had no memory of Connor. If he pushed,  _ maybe _ he might have seen him around at some point before, but not enough for the guy to ever register with him. Clearly, Connor didn’t know who he was either. But Connor had left a fucking impression on Richie, that was for sure.

“I just… If Henry had thought I was…” Connor said.

“So it was fine if he knew  _ I  _ was?” Richie said. Something shifted in his face then, eyes going wide. He had realised what he said, though Eddie had not. 

Eddie could guess, though.

“Fuck this,” Richie said.

“Richie, please. I just… I need to know it wasn’t my fault. Please.”

“It fucking was your fault that he attacked me then. It was your fault.”

“No, not that. Everything else. I just wanna know it wasn’t because of me. That he tried to kill you. Or that he did… I think about it all the time, man. He killed all those kids. His own friends. I hung out with those guys all summer and he fucking  _ killed  _ them. And he tried to kill you, too, and I just… I need to know… I need to know it wasn’t because of me.”

Connor’s eyes were welling up with tears. Eddie took a few steps away from him, back towards Richie. He didn’t even glance at Eddie though, just kept looking ahead at Richie, helplessly.

Richie’s face was not forgiving. His jaw was so tense that it had to hurt, his hands curling and uncurling into fists by his side. His mouth twisted, and it briefly looked like he was going to start screaming something. But then, suddenly, something released.

“No, that wasn’t your fault,” he said, his voice icy. “He already wanted to kill me for being a fucking little  _ fairy  _ way before I met you.”

Connor winced and looked away.

“I just… I think about that day all the time. I always think that… If I hadn’t said anything… If I’d just let you leave then maybe he never…” His voice was getting increasingly strangled as he talked, the tears starting to roll down his cheeks. It made Eddie’s entire face burn with embarrassment. 

“It wasn’t because of you. It really wasn’t,” Richie said, stiffly, without sympathy. “But I need you to leave me alone now.”

“I don’t… We couldn’t be… I want to know that…” Connor started, unsure of what he himself was trying to say.

“No.” Richie’s voice was decisive. “We can never be anything.” 

Connor trembled in place. For a second it looked like he was going to reach out to Richie, but Richie took that option away, backing off. Richie didn’t spare Connor another look as soon as he turned away, shoulders hunched. Eddie hesitated, but he had nothing to say. Connor’s humiliation and sorrow was so potent but there was nothing he could do to change it, and he didn’t know if Connor deserved to be saved from it, if Richie was being fair or not. He could only trust his gut, and that was that above all else, he trusted Richie. So, the two of them left Connor standing on the sidewalk that hot summer night, turning their backs on him and leaving him to the last big house party of Derry High. Eddie didn’t think he was ever going to see him again. 

Richie was walking so fast Eddie had to almost sprint after him to catch up. He had to just about tackle Richie to get him to stop, grabbing at him like he was trying to stop him from surging off and getting lost in the current. He dragged Richie to a stop, holding him down to keep him grounded. 

Richie’s face was thunderous. His mouth pulled tight over a clenched jaw, brow furrowed, straining not to cry. He kept trying to twist away from Eddie, unable to look him in the eye, but he didn’t rip his hands away as Eddie held them.

“What’s going on?” Eddie said.

“Nothing. Forget it,” Richie said. “This is fucking stupid. I don’t know why I try to…”

He took a deep shuddering breath.

“I’m leaving here,” he said. “That’s what counts. Fuck this place. Fuck this stupid fucking town!”

He lurched away from Eddie at the last few words, turning in a dramatic whirl of movement to kick over a garbage can outside someone’s house with an explosively loud rattle of metal on concrete as it hit the sidewalk. 

“You know Mike and Bill aren’t the only ones who saw stuff,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Eddie said. “Like… The werewolf is back?”

“No. Nevermind. Forget it.”

He sat down on the curb then, elbows on his knees, hands rubbing through his hair. Eddie sat down next to him. They were quiet for a little while, watching the streetlight on the street opposite fizz gently, giving off only a weak beam of orange light, slowly sputtering out.

“Every fucking time I go to one of these parties I always think that maybe this time I’m not going to look like an idiot. Or that this time they won’t be laughing at me. But it never changes, I can never change what they think.”

“Who cares what they think?” Eddie said. “We’re leaving.”

“If Bill thinks I’m going to risk everything again for these people, he’s fucking crazy. I wouldn’t piss on this town if it was on fire. I hope they all fucking fall into the ocean. I would rather the clown eats every last one of these motherfuckers than risk losing y…” He swallowed. “Forget it. I fucking hate it here. It’s not worth dying for. I nearly died saving them all last time and it didn’t change  _ anything. _ Why bother. Why fucking bother?” 

He scrubbed at his face roughly with his hands, like he was trying to convince himself not to cry.

“I hate being a kid,” he said. “Being a kid is the worst. I can’t goddamn wait to be like, forty, and a million miles away from here. I’m never, ever coming back. Not for anything.”

“We promised,” Eddie said.

“I don’t care. I don’t want to talk about this stupid shit. We don’t even know if that stupid fucking clown is back, anyway. Maybe we’re all just high, or crazy. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to do anything.”

“We can’t sit here all night.”

“Yes I can. I can do anything I want. Maybe I’m going to sit right here until I leave forever.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m not. That’s fucking stupid. You’d probably die of dehydration, or a homeless guy would mug you. And I wouldn’t help you.”

Eddie stood up sharply. Richie watched him, frowning a little. Eddie offered him a hand.

“I’m going back home,” he said. “Are you coming?”

Richie hesitated. “Yeah, ok.”

He took Eddie’s hand and stood up, making like it was some great effort to get to his feet. As they walked back to the house he draped an arm around Eddie’s shoulders loosely, leaning on him as they headed back home. It was still quiet and shut up at Eddie’s house; his mother had slept through the entire disappearing act, thank God. He’d been caught sneaking out a couple of times, and it had always been a total nightmare afterwards, all the hysterical handwringing, the fear that he could have died, been killed, been hit by a car. He always just sat there and wished he  _ had  _ been run over instead of having to listen to another one of his mother’s tantrums.

But that night it was quiet and he and Richie flopped in the living room to play video games, the volume turned way down low. They spoke only in whispering voices, but somehow that always made everything funnier, the straining to be quiet, the hysterical edge Eddie’s voice took every time one of them was too loud, Richie’s awful muffled laughter. He kept turning his face to hide it in Eddie’s shoulder when he laughed too hard, snorting into the cotton of his shirt. 

Eventually Richie left, as the early sun was starting to creep above the houses outside, the sky turning that pale white-blue at the fringes. As usual, as Richie slipped down the sidewalk towards his own home, Eddie wished he could have stayed the night. Maybe one day would come a night he would not have to leave.


	4. 3: We Didn't Start The Fire

At work the next day Eddie kept his eyes open for the ghost, or whatever it had been, but it didn't show. He was just left jumpy and on edge all day, watching the hallways for shadows. Larry got a laugh out of it, but it was laced with an obvious concern that made Eddie's ears burn.

"Your mom's not giving you a hard time about college, is she?" He said. He clapped Eddie on the shoulder. "Women, eh? In her nature to worry about you. Guess you're desperate to get away from it, but let me tell you something."

Eddie stared at him. What the fuck was he going to say? He didn't like the grin on Larry's face, the cartoonish way his features contorted around the smile.

"When you get a wife it'll be exactly the same!" He said. "You never get away from having a nagging woman in the house."

Eddie forced himself to smile and tried not to cringe away from Larry too obviously. He did not want a wife. Of course he didn't, he was fucking eighteen, but there was also... It didn't matter. The point was that Eddie wasn't going to be settling down with anyone any time soon.

He went to see Ben after work. Larry let him out halfway through the day and Eddie headed across town to the library. He assumed Ben would be there, because you could put good money on Ben being in the library on any given day when the weather was bad and the Losers weren't hanging out together. And because Eddie knew his friends, he was right. Ben was sitting at one of the tables inside, reading through a fat book on New England history with a bored look on his face.

"Found anything interesting?" Eddie said.

"Nope," Ben said. "Don't even know what I'm looking for, really. We probably know just about as much as anyone in these books ever will."

"About the whole history of New England?"

"No. About... You know."

Eddie did know. He slumped in the seat opposite Ben. The librarian behind the counter was watching him with a look of mistrust on her face. He wondered if she was one of the ones who had caught him and Richie using the library computer for things that they were not appropriate for and quickly averted his eyes.

"Did Mike and Bill tell you I saw something too?" He said.

"Yeah," Ben said. "I still haven't seen anything yet."

"Yeah, we haven't found anything about the old pattern either. At least not that I heard," Eddie said. "Maybe it's not IT."

"What else is it going to be?"

"I don't know. You think it has cousins?"

Ben shuddered with horror. "The last thing we need is THAT showing up and demanding revenge."

Eddie snorted with laughter. "You want to get out of here and get some lunch or something?"

"Yeah. This isn't going anywhere." He shut the book and slid it onto a cart of books to go and be reshelved. "This research was a lot more exciting when there was still a mystery about what we were looking for."

"There's a mystery now," Eddie said. "We just know the answer isn't good."

They headed out of the library and into the fine rain that was falling from the sky. Ben chucked his bike into the trunk of Eddie's car and climbed into the passenger seat. Eddie hoped he didn't get mud on the interior of his trunk. He had to put all his stuff in there soon.

"Have Stan or Richie said anything?" Ben said.

"No, not so far." Eddie turned on the radio but it was commercials so he turned it off again. "Richie's still saying if IT's back he's not going to do anything."

Ben had an odd, calculating look on his face. "But he doesn't mean that, right?"

"No, I don't think he does. He's just being an asshole because he hates Derry.”

Eddie couldn't even blame him for that. Derry was a terrible place to live. Richie had always hated it the most, though. He had a passion in his hatred, a raw, bitter anger, like the town was out to get him. Eddie didn't like Derry, but to him, it was like Derry was barely even real. He couldn't believe that anything he did here mattered to the town at all. It was like he was the ghost of Derry, something intangible that left no impression where it went. It was not, after all, like his friends had really needed him when it came to killing IT, or like he was a very memorable feature at school, or like he had achieved much of anything. His only real achievement was something that no one would ever know about and no one would ever thank him for.

It was kind of funny, really. He chose to consider it funny. It was the better alternative.

The radio crackled on again and Eddie looked at it, distracted. The traffic was slowing to a crawl and he took his eyes off the road to fiddle with the dial. The radio appeared to be off, the LCD screen dull and unlit.

"--the discovery was made by a maintenance worker investigating a blockage," the radio said in between bursts of static.

The cars had come to a dead halt in front of them. Ben leaned out of the passenger window to try and see what was going on.

"There's an ambulance in the road," he said.

"Officials are saying the bodies number--" the radio continued before the voice cut off and was interrupted by an explosion of  _ We Didn't Start the Fire _ booming out into the interior of Eddie's car at a volume so loud it nearly ruptured his eardrums. It cut just as abruptly to a commercial for  _ Ghostbusters II, _ the theme wailing in the small cavern of Eddie's car like a ghost itself.

"What's going on?" Ben said.

"I don't know!" Eddie said, noticing how pitched in panic his voice was and wishing he could wrangle some degree of control over that almost more than he was worried about his inability to control his own car stereo.

"Why is it... Why that trailer?"

"I don't  _ know!" _

A car behind him honked and Eddie looked up desperately at the moving traffic. As much as he pushed at the buttons the volume of the radio only increased, the reporter's voice cutting back in again.

"--The children were said to have been missing for over twenty-four hours but were--"

Ben grabbed a cassette tape from the ground and shoved it into the tape player. It whirred for a second and then suddenly that took over, the sounds of Joy Division playing at a far more reasonable level now flooding the car. Eddie felt the muscles of his shoulders relax a fraction, until a horn behind him sounded again and he had to step on the gas and get back to crawling down the block.

"Joy Division?" Ben said.

"It's Richie's," Eddie said, touchily. "Sorry I don't have any boy bands."

"It's a band with boys in."

Ben smiled shakily and Eddie wanted to argue the point but they were starting to pass the ambulance that was still parked in the middle of the narrow street and the conversation died in their throats as they looked out at it.

Somewhere in the back of Eddie's mind he had known they were near where Beverly had used to live. It had been such a long time since he had gone there, and he had only ever been inside her apartment once, that it wasn't something he thought of very often. Even the times when he was missing her, it didn't really come to mind. But sitting in his car, he looked out at the old building and at the ambulance parked in front of it, and at the gurney being loaded into the back of it.

Alvin Marsh was lying on it, his face twisted to the side. He was presumably alive, but there was something unhealthy and motionless about the way he was lying, something that made part of Eddie's skin crawl instinctively.  _ There is something sick about that person,  _ a part of Eddie's animal brain said.

"Holy cow," Ben said.

"What happened to him?" Eddie said.

"I don't know," Ben said. Then, after a pause: "I hope he dies."

Eddie thought about how IT had not just gone for the children. The children were ITs primary targets, but IT had not been all that discerning about who IT took. IT went for whoever was vulnerable, whenever IT could. IT let the Black Spot burn down. IT blew up the ironworks. IT took its victims where it could. IT had already touched Alvin Marsh's life.

"I hope it's painful," Eddie said.

They drove away from the ambulance and didn't stop to ask.

The news got around pretty fast. It did, in small towns. 

Eddie was in the BlockBuster with Richie and Bill. Richie worked there. He had leapt at the chance to get a job there the moment he was old enough, and abused his privilege mercilessly. He treated it less like a job and more like his own personal video library and Eddie thought the chances of him getting fired before he left town at the end of the summer were pretty high. Bill was there to rent a movie, which meant he was there to argue with Richie.

Eddie was renting  _ EarthBound _ again. He had already beaten it. Richie had been at his house when he'd cleared it the first time and had told him that if Eddie restarted the game right before the end again he was going to flip the fuck out and beat it for him. Eddie had finished it and then immediately wanted to play it again. He was leaning on the counter at the front of the store and humming the ending song under his breath while he waited for Richie to stop arguing with Bill long enough to renew his rental.

Richie and Bill were arguing about horror movies. Eddie had observed that both Richie and Bill were obsessed with films that he and anyone else with any sense would rightfully label as shit, but they were obsessed with the exact opposite kinds of shit and wouldn't tolerate each other's taste for a second.

_ "Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 _ is a joke. It fucking sucks, Richie, admit it," Bill said.

"You don't know goddamn anything about film or about comedy," Richie said.

"It's a  _ horror movie _ it's supposed to be  _ scary." _

"You thought  _ The Exorcist II  _ was good, you can't tell me shit."

"I didn't say it was good, I said it was underrated."

"You said it was better than  _ The Exorcist III!" _

"It  _ is  _ better than  _ The Exorcist III." _

"I'm going to fucking kill you."

Eddie peeled away from them to wander through the shelves a little more while they argued. There were a couple of customers in the store, and he hoped they were prepared to have to wait for the bickering to be over before they were actually able to rent anything, because he didn't see Richie or Bill slowing down unless Richie's manager actually peeled himself out of the office long enough to tell him off for fighting with a customer, and Eddie didn't think that was likely. He walked down the aisle, the carpet disturbingly sticky underfoot where some kid had spilled their soda and Richie had done a piss-poor job of actually cleaning it up.

None of the films really leapt out to him as things he wanted to watch. They rarely did. He watched movies, sure, but he never had Richie or Bill's ravening interest in them. They could hold his attention, but that was about all they held. They always felt too... Fake. When he watched them all he could ever think about was how the actors got to go home after the end of the day and wash the film off themselves, change out of costume, continue unaffected into the rest of their lives. The explosion wasn't really going to kill Tom Cruise, the bad guys would never catch Bruce Willis. He didn't get what it was exactly that drove Richie to the point of hysteria over things like plot details and camera angles.

Two of the customers, two old biddies, one of whom was clutching a copy of  _ The Bodyguard _ were talking with their heads together.

"Stroke, they said," the one without the movie said. "Just dropped. The only reason they found him at all was because he hit the floor so hard Marjorie below heard the bang and thought he'd died."

"He didn't die though?" The one with the movie asked, looking at her companion with beady eyes filled with curiosity.

"No, not then. They got him back to the hospital but it was too late."

"He was never the same since he got that knock on the head."

Eddie wondered if that hit on the head had killed him. Slowly, like a disease. No one really knew how the brain worked. Little things could upset it so much and then without treatment it would steadily decay until… 

Had Beverly... Had Beverly... Eddie couldn't let himself think it.

"If that daughter of his had been there she'd have been able to help him, but she cleared off a long time ago."

Eddie's body was cold. He slunk away from the ladies towards Richie and Bill, who were still venomously arguing, now about the qualities of the  _ Nightmare on Elm Street  _ franchise, which was one of Eddie's least favourites. He had no patience at all for wise-cracking, shapeshifting demons that ran through people's dreams, unable to be stopped by the useless, uncaring adults around it, but Richie had a weird passion for them and had seen  _ Nightmare on Elm Street 2 _ so many times his VHS tape had broken. Bill thought  _ Nightmare on Elm Street 2  _ was shit.

"Hey," Eddie said.

"It's the worst one in the franchise," Bill said. "It has the worst acting by far."

"You shouldn't even be allowed to fucking watch movies," Richie said. "You don't understand anything."

"Hey," Eddie said.

_ "Dream Warriors  _ has the coolest kills."

"I don't  _ care _ about that."

"Hey!" Eddie said.

Richie tore his eyes away from Bill with a look of complete exasperation on his face that really got under Eddie's skin.

"What?" Richie said.

"Oh, sorry for interrupting, I know it was so important," Eddie said, voice so sarcastic it could have poisoned someone who wasn't as used to it as Richie.

"Well!" Richie started.

"Don't start."

"I wasn't starting." He was sulking now, almost pouting at Eddie, big blue eyes filled with disappointment that his incredibly important conversation had been derailed and now Eddie wouldn't even respect it.

"Beverly's dad died," Eddie said.

Both Bill and Richie went silent.

"Good," Richie said, after a while.

A customer approached the counter and both Bill and Eddie shuffled out of the way. The man eyed them uncertainly as Richie rushed to check him out as quickly as possible, shoving the VHS tapes of well-loved Disney movies in front of him and giving him the 'get the hell out of here' face when he dawdled for more than a minute scooping them under his arm. Eddie watched him scurry out of the building with his daughter in tow.

"You don't think..." Bill ventured.

"I do," Eddie said.

"IT killed kids," Richie said. "And IT  _ hasn't _ been killing kids."

"You're looking at it too simplistically," Bill said.

"You're making it too fucking complicated. So some old man died, so what? Old men drop dead all the time, especially when they're fucking drinking themselves to death in their lonely apartments because no one cares about them." Richie yanked the lid off his bottle of coke and drank from it almost angrily.

"He was like fifty," Bill said.

"Well the life expectancy is much shorter when you live in poverty," Richie retorted.

"What? What the fuck does that mean?" Eddie said. "We're not in AP Gov, Rich."

Richie shrugged and was clearly pouting to himself, as if he'd been scolded in front of the class and didn't want everyone to laugh at him.

"The clown didn't just kill people," Bill hissed. "It made other people do things. You  _ know _ this. It drove people crazy. It drove this whole town crazy. Why do you think it's so terrible here? IT's in the fucking Earth."

"You're jumping at shadows."

"I saw something," Eddie said. "I know I did."

Richie glared at him, looking almost betrayed, but he didn't call Eddie a liar.

"If it's not killing us, I don't know what the fucking problem is," Richie said. "Beverly's dad was the fucking devil."

"You can't just leave people to IT," Bill said.

Richie looked at him dead-on, eyes burning hateful behind his glasses. It was odd how much he still had the capacity to take Eddie by surprise. Eddie would have thought that after all these years of knowing each other, knowing each other more than they'd ever known anyone else in their lives, he would have seen every fraction of Richie there was to see. But somehow he was wrong about that. Eddie wasn't sure if he knew the Richie he saw then, the coldness behind those grey-blue eyes, the dark set of his jaw.

"Fuck people," Richie said. "Fuck this town."

And Eddie found that he was suddenly doubting himself. He thought that Richie would always be the first one of them to take action, but maybe not. Maybe Richie would leave this entire town to drown. Eddie's skin felt cold and there was a burning sickness in the back of his throat, anxiety beginning to make itself known in his body as Richie and Bill stared at each other, blue eyes on duller blue. There was that twitch in the muscle of Richie's jaw again, like his beating heart was making itself known. The silence was so loaded that the weight of it could have broken someone's back.

It broke Eddie's, in the end. Richie and Bill were both the unstoppable force, crashing into each other on their own private death drives, and the only thing Eddie could control was himself.

"Forget the game," he said. "I'm going home."

Richie's eyes snapped away from Bill and to him, the anger in his face melting away and being replaced with clear disappointment, but Eddie was already leaving, pushing past the women who were talking by the door and letting himself out on the sidewalk. The dry, still air made his skin itch. He didn't look back at the store when he left.

It was gone midnight when Richie showed up at his house. Eddie slipped out of bed and walked across the room to open the window and let Richie inelegantly tumble through it. He landed on the floor with a bit of a thump and they both moved with painful slowness then, listening to the silence of the house for any sign that they were about to get caught in the act, but there was nothing but the faint rattle of the pipes in the walls and the hum of the A/C. Richie straightened up as if he'd been compressed into a tiny space for too long. He had a tendency to slouch and whenever he stretched out tall it always somehow took Eddie aback; suddenly Richie would be looming over him even more than he usually did and it was... An odd feeling, to look up at him like that.

Richie thrust a plastic BlockBuster bag into his hands. Eddie looked in it and found a copy of  _ EarthBound,  _ a packet of gushers and a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos.

"Oh," he said. "Thank you."

"Since you're always playing it so much," Richie said. He slouched back over to the bed and flopped down on it.

"Wait, you rented it?" Eddie said.

"No," Richie said, flashing teeth in his stupid wide grin that made Eddie feel crazy. "So now you can keep it."

"This isn't going on my record, is it?" Eddie said.

"No. I said Greta Keene took it out. She can deal with it."

Richie made himself comfortable on the narrow bed, feet dangling off the edge. He kicked his shoes off, letting them thump onto the floor. Eddie sat on the edge of the bed and opened the bag of Cheetos. Richie immediately surged forward to grab a handful. Eddie knew he probably shouldn't have been eating junk food in the middle of the night, but he found he cared a little less about his own dietary rules when Richie was there enabling him to cram his face with salt and sugar. He helped himself to the chips too.

"I'm not trying to be an asshole," Richie said.

"You make it look so effortless," Eddie said.

"Shut up. Eds, we're all leaving in like, a few weeks," Richie said. "Or like, a couple of months. Officially none of this shit has to be our problem anymore."

"We promised," Eddie said.

"We were kids." 

"I don't want to talk about this anymore."

"Good, me neither."

Richie grabbed Eddie by the arm and tugged him over so they were both lying down on the bed, side-by side. His shoulder was tucked into Richie's chest and he could smell the sickly scent of whatever cheap aftershave Richie used, the starkly different scent of his family's detergent. You couldn't really recognise your own scent; Eddie hoped that when they lay close like this Richie didn't mind how he smelled. He wriggled to make himself a little more comfortable, slotting himself more neatly against Richie, their limbs falling into a cooperative angle.

There was a lull in the conversation only for a few moments before Richie grew bored of the silence and started talking about LA again. He talked about LA a lot, for a guy who had applied to college in Maine. Eddie thought that maybe it was because it was a place that seemed so far removed from Derry, Maine, that it might as well have been a fairy tale kingdom.

"Do you think I could surf? I think I could surf," Richie said. "My blindingly white skin could reflect the sun into everyone else's eyes and then I'd win."

Eddie snorted with laughter.

"I don't think you win at surfing," Eddie said.

"Why do people do it then?"

Eddie thought about lying on a board and drifting free on the open ocean, the waves rocking at him gently.

"Because they like it," he said.

"What's the point if you don't get to be the best at it?" Richie said.

"You couldn't surf. You can't even ride a skateboard. You wiped out so hard when you tried to ride Alison Skinner's last year."

Richie had convinced Alison that he could definitely skate, forgetting somehow that his body was perpetually twice as big as he thought it was and he didn't have the best balance just walking on his own two feet. It had been him and Eddie hanging around outside the library and for some reason Richie had gotten it into his head that he was going to be a natural born skater and blow the other kids out of the water effortlessly, a disaster that Eddie had seen coming from a hundred miles away. He wasn't sure why Richie was trying so hard, other than because Alison was tall and had long curly blond hair she pulled through the back of her snapback, a look that made her stand out somewhat, which said more about Derry than Alison. For a moment, when Richie had first gotten onto the board, Eddie had had a brief flash that actually, Richie was really good on his bike, and maybe he had a hope in hell of being good at this, only to have this thought discarded when Richie had immediately thrown himself down the stairs. He had thankfully gotten out of that with a bad scrape on his leg, which Eddie had taken a kind of odd pride in cleaning up and bandaging while Richie complained that Alison's skateboard was faulty, definitely.

"Ha, yeah. What happened to her?" Richie said.

"She got pregnant and moved in with her boyfriend in, like, Portland," Eddie said. "I think."

"Shit. That sucks. Glad I never got anyone pregnant. Don't know if I'd be willing to give up my bright and illustrious future for some kid."

"You haven't been near a girl since your mom stopped breastfeeding you."

Richie burst out laughing and then buried his face in Eddie's hair to muffle sound. Eddie's stomach twisted but he smiled, feeling the press of Richie's face against the top of his head, the warm breath tickling the hair there.

"Neither have you!" Richie said. "Although in your case, I guess that wasn't very long ago."

"Gross! Richie!" Eddie elbowed him in the ribs.

"You set me up!"

Richie hadn't moved his face away from the top of his head. All Eddie would have to do would be to twist his head back and their faces would be right there.

"Did you like Alison Skinner?" Eddie said.

"Sure," Richie said. "She was cool."

"No. Did you  _ like  _ her."

Richie made a noise, exhaling in a huff through his nose.

"What does it matter?" He said.

"Don't know. Thought you wanted to impress her."

"I don't care about impressing people from school," Richie said, bitterly, though Eddie knew that he did, in the way you couldn't help but care a little bit about what the people around you thought. "I just thought it would be cool."

Eddie thought about watching Richie getting his balance on the board, watching the long lean of his body when he'd kicked off. He twisted his fingers against the side of Richie's shirt.

"That rhymed," he said, because he didn't want to say anything that meant anything. Richie laughed again, a little.

They went quiet for a few moments. Eddie pulled at the edge of Richie's T-shirt, stretching at the worn cotton.

"Why didn't you apply for college in LA?" He said.

Richie shrugged. "I don't know. I don't care about college."

"You're really going to stay in Maine for another four years? To do  _ chemistry _ ?" Eddie said.

"I like chemistry," Richie said, though he didn't sound particularly convinced by this.

Eddie knew why he'd chosen it as a major. It was because it had been what he'd gotten the highest grades in when he'd finished high school. He could imagine Richie looking at the college brochures, his parents looking at his report cards, telling him what he would and wouldn't be able to do. He could almost hear the arguments, the sulky resentment in Richie's voice, landing his finger down on something that he had always been good at in a thoughtless way, able to regurgitate basic facts. Richie was smart. He was good at math and he was good at memorising things. He was not good at working hard at things he didn't care about. Eddie's chest clutched with anxiety when he thought about Richie being hundreds of miles away from him, the homework from his classes mounting on his desk, the lack of people around him who would be able to tell him what he could or couldn't do. You were free at college, free in a way that they had never been in their lives. There were no parents around to tell them what to do, and there were no people who knew their whole life stories in the bigger cities to scare them back into place. Alone in a new city, Richie would have a blank slate and no repercussions he cared about. Eddie thought he was a little scared of who Richie might be when there was no one around who loved him.

"Why didn't you apply to New York?" Eddie said.

"I wasn't going to get into New York," Richie said.

"You could have tried."

"Why bother? It would have just cost me fuckin'... Eighty dollars in application fees and more rejection letters to make me look even more like an idiot."

Eddie did not say that if he had then there would have been someone around to look after him. He didn't think Richie would like that.

The hot weather continued for a few more days and then there was a rainstorm. The rain hammered down for three days, and the news was filled with stories about the sewers flooding and Eddie's dreams were filled with rushing water and the things it would drag out. Who was to say everything had been brought up the first time the lair and its horrible contents had been vomited out into the world? None of them knew how this worked, none of them really knew much of anything, and in Eddie's nightmares the dark uncertainty of their lives was waiting for them with sharp and terrible teeth.

He dreamed about the bodies in the river, and in his dreams the man with dark hair was one of them. The man would slowly move to lift himself out, water running in thick rivulets over his face, obscuring his features until he would start to turn his head to Eddie, and the face beneath would be distorted not because of the refraction of light through the water, because of the terrible disease that had taken a hold of it. Eddie could not recognise who the man was, but he knew Eddie.

After the rain cleared the Barrens smelled like fresh, wet earth and there was a cleanness to the air, a kind of crispness that Eddie thought was one of the only things he might miss about Derry when he left. He didn't think that New York would ever be this green. He was not someone who had any particular fondness for nature, but he  _ had  _ grown up in a place that was only miles away from farmland and wilderness, where he could ride his bike for less than an hour and end up in a place where he could be so isolated he felt like the only person alive on earth. He didn't think he would ever feel alone in New York.

The rain had flooded the clubhouse. The door on the top of it was not sturdy or solid, had come apart in its old age and let water through first in little drops and then, as none of them paid attention and the condition of the wood got worse, in thick streams that had started to build up against the sodden earth. The water levels inside it had begun to rise, and then it had started to eat through their things. When the six of them arrived, it was exactly like Ben had feared. The clubhouse was fucked.

Ben had such a pathetic look on his face when they climbed down the ladder into the big empty space that even Richie didn't make fun of him. The dirt floor squelched horribly under Eddie's shoes as he stepped off the ladder and onto the ground. He screwed up his face in disgust.

"I always wanted an indoor swimming pool," Richie said. He made his way over to the hammock, which was now mostly just a mouldering strip of cloth lying on the mud and picked it up with a finger and thumb. It dripped dirty water onto the ground.

Knowing with a terrible certainty what was about to happen, Eddie said: "Don't come near me with that thing."

"No? You don't want to have your turn?" Richie said. "What happened to the rules? You don't want to share with me?"

Stan watched with a look of deep disdain as he stopped inspecting the swing, which had mostly survived but had taken on an unpleasant sheen as the water had made its way inside the wood and rope. It was probably filled with all kinds of horrible fungi, Eddie was sure. Moss and mould. Nightmarish stuff.

Bill and Mike were picking through the junk the Losers had left in the clubhouse over the years to see what was salvageable. Most of the posters on the wall were ruined beyond repair, but they'd been decaying the second someone had had the bright idea to pin them onto dirt. The stereo that Stan had gotten from a thrift store was ruined, Mike mournfully poking at it as it sat there and did absolutely nothing except gently leak battery fluid. Ben walked around and inspected the damage with the look of a surveyor who had ten times his experience.

"If you touch me with that you'll never share anything of mine ever again," Eddie threatened.

"Oh my God, including air?" Richie said. "How exciting for me."

"You won't need air after I choke you to death."

"You guys will fight about literally anything," Stan interrupted promptly.

"He started it," Richie and Eddie both said.

Stan rolled his eyes and went to gingerly pick at some of the boxes of crap they'd left lying around. There was a pile of comics that had been reduced to pulp, the bright pages washed of ink and turned into sludge. A load of cassette tapes that were dirty but might have survived, if someone wanted to put the time into testing them. Stan was not going to be the one to do that, Eddie assumed. Neither was he.

Richie dropped the dead hammock and went to bother Ben, who was standing under the door and looking up at it with a thoughtful but clearly worried expression on his face.

"What do you think, chief?" Richie said. "Can you get her up and running again?"

"Maybe," Ben said. "You'd have to fix the door to make it waterproof, to stop more rain from getting in, but once you'd done that you'd really just have to wait for the ground to dry out. And then maybe reinforce some of these struts? Some kind of metal..."

"What's the point?" Stan said. His dark eyes looked grave in his face. "You're going to California in like a month and a half."

Ben's mouth was slightly open as he processed what Stan had said.

"I don't know," he said. "I'd just feel better if I fixed it. I kind of let you all down."

"No you didn't," Stan said. "It was just nature."

"You know, uh, really tall skyscrapers? When you get that tall, the wind becomes a huge problem. So you have to account for that," Ben said. "You have to think around the way nature affects what you're building. That's part of the job."

"You built this when you were thirteen. It's fine that it went wrong. Nothing from when you're thirteen actually lasts."

"That's not true." There was a solid set to Ben's face that suggested he didn't want to argue about this. It was funny how even he, with his gentle eyes and his wavering uncertainty, could have his hard limits.

Stan sighed and went back to picking through things that the rain had tried to destroy.

"Stan's right, though," Richie said. "Just leave it, Ben. We're all going to be long gone. You probably won't even have time to fix it before you leave."

Mike had stopped sorting through things and was looking at them talk. Richie hadn't noticed, but Eddie did. His gut twisted with guilt when he saw the look. He didn't say anything, though; Bill caught Mike's eye and reached out, a hand on his back, just a tiny touch. It looked familiar.

"None of us would be here to appreciate it," Stan said.

"Someone else might though," Mike said. "Someone else might find it."

"They don't deserve it," Richie said.

Mike frowned at him. Richie shrugged and backed off, walking around the limitations of the clubhouse. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He made a vague show of pretending to hold out his lighter -- Eddie wasn't sure if the intent was to burn down the clubhouse or to dry it out -- but no one reacted so he put it away.

There was some discussion about what was to be done with the stuff that was beyond repair; Richie thought it might as well be left there, a kind of tomb to the past. Well, he  _ said ‘ _ time capsule’, like the plastic bucket they'd buried as part of a school project in third grade and dug up at the end of the year, finding they had changed very little over the course of nine or so months, but Eddie heard ‘tomb’. Like the ones the Egyptian kings used to have, where they were buried with all their most important belongings and left in giant tributes to their past lives as they went on to new ones, ones that they couldn't possibly understand as mortals. Most of Eddie's understanding of pharaohs and ancient Egypt came from elementary school history and the old black and white Universal horror movie  _ The Mummy _ , which had inexplicably scared the living daylights out of Ben, but he was fairly sure that pharaohs had been buried with precious things and also, sometimes, precious people. Servants trapped in the tombs with their dead kings, their lives given over in tribute to someone else. The idea was they would continue to serve their masters in the afterlife, carrying on the ritual of servitude long after they had passed over to what was supposedly a better life. Eddie didn't know if the servants were buried alive or after they'd died but the thought of being alive in the tomb of the dead made him far more afraid than the silly Halloween costume mummy ever had; condemned to the darkness and left to slowly starve, surrounded by testaments to someone else. _ Live out the rest of your life and die for the image of someone who has already wasted theirs. _

He agreed with Stan and Mike when they said they should try clearing out some of the old things. The six of them squabbled a little about what would be needed, but in the end Eddie and Stan agreed to go out and get trash bags from Stan's house, which was closest. It felt relatively fair; they were both on the side of cleaning out the clubhouse. Eddie didn't know what was making Stan advocate clearing it up when he had been ready to condemn the place as being part of their mutual pasts, but he was happy to have some help. They climbed out of the clubhouse as Bill was trying to goad Richie into starting to actually clear up, leaving the four of them to organise themselves.

They walked for a little while in quiet, the woods around them peaceful other than the sound of wildlife existing on its own, uncaring of their presence and able to function perfectly fine whether or not they existed, whether or not they had ever stepped foot into the forest. The world would continue without the Losers Club, whatever 'the world' constituted. Stan was half-watching out for anything interesting, but he was mostly focused on just getting through the woods without twisting an ankle or walking through any poison ivy. They were perhaps slower, just the two of them, without Bill or Richie to charge ahead and clear the way, but they were definitely less at risk of stumbling and tripping down an unseen burrow in the earth.

The river was still high; there had been countless times the six or seven of them had happily waded through or crossed over the river in their childhood, either up to their knees in the water or carefully picking their way over the stones that jutted up above the water's surface, but it was a riskier operation now. Often in summer the river would be no higher than ankle-height, a stream more than anything, but the rains had turned it into a dangerous beast and even after a few days of dry it hadn't calmed. They could make their way all the way down the bank to the places where the ground rose higher or there were bridges, but there was going to be no wading through it this time. Eddie was fairly sure it would come up past his waist, and it would be hard to stand in.

He could hear the river before he saw it, the sound of the water rushing through the earth. The two of them were at a high point of ground before the land sloped down to the riverbanks; in dry weather it was often a sea of pebbles and sandy dirt but at that time the rocky bed was hidden, the water coming high up the dirt sides. Stan had come to a stop at the peak, right before they met the bank, and Eddie, trailing behind, came to stand beside him.

Eddie scanned his eyes over the water. Stan was staring out down the river, something alert in his face. His pale eyes were fixed somewhere in the middle distance but Eddie didn't follow his eyeline to check out what he was looking at. Maybe it was just ignorance that he was choosing to ignore the signs, but if it was, it was wilful. He took a few steps towards the river bank when Stan grabbed his arm with a rough enough urgency that Eddie's entire body jarred with surprise.

Stan pointed wordlessly out, down the water. As he followed the line of Stan's finger, Eddie could feel his throat closing up in fear, the pace of his heart picking up. Everything about the way Stan was stock still screamed danger and when Eddie's eyes fell further downstream and caught sight of something in the water, he understood instantly why.

"Is that..." Eddie started.

"I don't know," Stan said.

It looked like there was a body in the water. It was several metres down the river, too far for it to be anything but the vague impression of something moving against the water, floating over the tides. The part of Eddie's brain that stupidly wanted the best said  _ hey, maybe it's just a fallen branch, _ but there was a way the thing was moving that suggested no, this was something soft. This was something of many parts that were meant to move free, not be twisting in the torrents of water buffering it from side to side.

"Did Mike tell you," Eddie said, "I saw something too?"

Stan closed his eyes for a second, but he nodded, a sharp jerk of the head.

"If IT's back..." he said, voice wavering a little. "I was always hoping I'd be a lot further away."

He hadn't let go of Eddie's arm. Eddie wasn't sure for whose sake he was holding on.

"What are you going to do?" Eddie said.

"I don't know," Stan said. "Whatever I can to help."

Stan was... Eddie either thought of himself as fragile or angrily, furiously refused to believe he was, swinging between the two with a volatility that hurt himself most of all, but he never thought of Stan as being fragile. They both had a tendency to be afraid, more than Bill or Beverly ever seemed to, a mutual nervousness that made them inclined to follow rules. But Stan was not a coward. Eddie thought of him as being  _ solid _ somehow, very dependable. You could rely on Stan. He was a more impartial judge than Eddie, Richie or Bill, but less self-sacrificing for the sake of others than Ben or Mike. It was Stan, a lot of the time, who called it when things went too far. Countless times when it had just been the four of them it had been Stan who would wade in and call it off when childish arguments went too far. He had been the first one to cut Richie off with a 'beep-beep' that completely took him off-guard. It was like he had been bored of being a child his entire life.

Eddie had seen him afraid, of course. He had seen all of his friends in the darkest places of their lives. He had gone through hell with them all. It made sense that Stan would be afraid now, and that he would be afraid of IT coming back. In a way it made Eddie feel better that  _ he  _ was so afraid, that they both were. It was not just that he was a coward, lesser than Bill or Richie or Mike. Stan understood. Stan would do what you had to do, but he wasn't going to do anything stupid. He had been with them all every step of the way.

Stan was a quiet person. Someone who was thoughtful and deliberate. There was something about him that had always felt slightly removed to Eddie. Maybe this was true of everyone, that all people had something of themselves they held back on -- except Richie, who Eddie felt like he knew every side of whether he wanted to or not -- but it felt almost poignantly obvious with Stan that he showed only as much of his hand as he ever wanted to. He wasn't duplicitous, just careful. Just quiet.

He stood at the bank of the river and Eddie wished he knew what he was thinking.

"If we leave..." Eddie said. "Do we have to come back again? And again?"

"I don't know," Stan said, simply.

"Would you be able to? How do you live knowing that you have to come back for IT?"

"I don't know."

The body in the river twisted. Stan's eyes narrowed.

"Stan," Eddie said.

"What?" Stan said.

"Do you really want your entire life to be about chasing this thing?"

"I think by now we both know we don't have a lot of control over what our lives are," Stan said.

The way he said it was not sarcastic, but nor was it kind. The words came heavily to them both.

The body was moving against the tide. It should have flowed away but it was drifting towards them with a slow but definite certainty, as if guided. The sun shining off the water and the distance made the shape of it an indecipherable mass, but Eddie thought he could see the head, thick brown hair, a black coat of some kind, a leg dragging in the water...

There was more than one. Coming over the horizon now, there were more shapes, things moving silently through the water towards them, things that were smaller than adult people, but that meant nothing when you considered the victims that IT liked to choose.

"What do we do?" Eddie said.

"I think we..."

Stan stopped. He narrowed his eyes and squinted against the sun.

"It's..." His voice trailed off.

"What?" Eddie said.

"It's not people," he said.

Eddie looked at him, his face screwed up in concentration, the direct sunlight making him look washed out and pale. Then Eddie looked up at the things floating down the stream.

Or, swimming.

"Are those... Are those beavers?" Stan said.

"What the fuck?"

Through the water, a family of beavers swam towards them. As the animals got closer they grew clearer, but there was something hanging in the air around them, a stillness, as though the air and the water weren't touching them at all. Stan slowly started to walk down the bank towards them, carefully, like he didn't want to scare them away. Eddie waited a moment and then followed him, his sneakers sliding on the wet earth as they grew closer to the sides of the river.

Derry had started as a beaver-trapping town. It was the kind of thing that was of absolute no interest to most people who weren't town historians or children overly amused by the word 'beaver'. It had never particularly meant anything to Eddie, who cared very little for the sordid history of Derry and wanted to pretend he was the kind of person who didn't find obscene puns funny. But it meant that when the town was new, it was fur and lumber that had built it, until the lumber had taken over, something far more easy to sustain and turn into a profit for as many people as possible. There were old stories of lumberjacks and trappers who had turned from respectable working men to something else, something savage and brutal in the woods alone, when society was no longer watching what they did. One of the stories that Mike and Ben had marked out as being  _ of note,  _ which meant possibly related to IT, were a series of slayings perpetuated by a lumberjack in the woods around Derry, and another had been the slaying of a woodsman’s family by the patriarch himself. There was as much blood as there was sap on the axes around Derry, it seemed.

No one hunted beaver for fur around Derry anymore. The unsustainable hunting methods had decimated the local population and, unlike other areas of the state, it had never recovered. They were part of the history of the town, but not the lifeblood of modern Derry. Driven to the point of extinction, they had become a figment of the past. There were new jobs that were just as harsh, unstable and unforgiving for men to do in the modern world. 

Despite this, the animals swam down the river in front of Eddie's eyes. Stan was walking towards them, getting closer and closer to the animals. Eddie's heart surged in fear, though he couldn't say why. The beavers took no more notice of them than if they were trees growing on the banks of the stream, as if the animals were merely a recording. 

"What the fuck does this mean?" Eddie said.

Stan turned to look at him. His mouth was agape but he couldn't think of a thing to say.

When they looked back the river was empty.

"Something wants our attention," Stan said. "And if it's not IT, then it's something we don't know."

To Eddie, that sounded worse.


	5. 4: Molly Ringwald

By the time they got back to the clubhouse the others had started a small fire outside and were throwing old comics, posters, bits of wood and cardboard onto it. Stan scowled at it fiercely. Eddie could almost see the boy scouts badges on his chest.

"Do you realise how irresponsible it is starting a fire in the middle of a forest?" He said.

"Come on Stan, there's four of us here and the ground is so wet we nearly couldn't get it started," Richie said. "It's not going to spread."

Eddie found it hard to fall into arguing with the others. He climbed down the steps into the clubhouse to start picking up some of the trash that was left. The others had spent time collecting things into different piles, presumably of stuff that could be burned and stuff that would have to be hauled out to a dump, but the job was only really half-done. Eddie didn't care enough to get into an argument about it. He just went about picking things up, throwing them into the garbage bag he'd brought, tossing out old tapes and bits of trash without really looking at what he was picking up, moving automatically.

He had only been at the job for a few moments when Richie slid down the ladder and stopped him. There was a look on Richie's face that was either concern or him about to launch into a joke. It was sometimes unclear.

"What's going on?" Richie said.

"Nothing," Eddie said.

"Bullshit. You're acting like you saw a ghost."

Eddie gave him a sharp look. Richie shrugged, eyes cartoonishly wide and innocent.

"We saw something else," Eddie said.

Richie's entire body deflated. It was like a button had been flipped that switched and all the energy was draining out of him, the lightness with which he'd slid down the ladder suddenly replaced by a full-body heaviness that had him sagging where he stood.

"What do you mean you  _ saw something?" _ He said, though it was immediately obvious what Eddie had meant.

"What do you think?" Eddie said.

Bill had also been climbing down the ladder to join them and came to a dead halt at the bottom.

"So that's it then," he said. "IT has to be back."

Richie's face was thunderous.

"What did you see?" He demanded.

"It was... In the river we saw a pack of beavers," Eddie said.

"What?!" Richie said, barking with laughter. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"The animal. Like there had to have been ten of them, they were just swimming up the river and at first we thought it was bodies but it was this family of  _ beavers,  _ and then when we got close they just... Disappeared."

Even Bill looked taken aback by that.

"They didn't do anything?" Bill said.

"No, it was like when I saw the man, or you saw The Black Spot," Eddie said. "It just stopped."

"Maybe what it is," Richie said, "is the fact you've never gotten laid is getting to you--"

"Can you take this fucking seriously?" Eddie said.

"No!" Richie laughed.

"What's going on?" Ben's voice came from above, wavering a little with worry.

"It's fine Ben," Richie said. "Eddie's just fucking snapped."

Eddie growled with frustration and shoved past Richie, climbing up the ladder to go and find Stan. Stan was carefully poking at the little campfire, nudging a circle of rocks around it so it would be at least a little more contained while Mike watched thoughtfully. Mike looked surprised to see Eddie stomping towards them; Stan did not.

"Tell them, Stan," Eddie said.

Stan looked up at Eddie and then let out a long sigh.

"We saw something and I don't know if it was IT..." He said.

"Of course it wasn't IT," Richie said. "Since when did IT appear as like, a fucking random guy? Or a bunch of rodents?"

"I don't  _ know,  _ Richie, but what else would it be?" Stan said.

"Why can't you accept that IT's back?" Bill said.

"Maybe I don’t give a shit if IT is or isn’t!” Richie shouted back.

Ben looked pained by the raised voices. He was always uncomfortable when the others started to fight, never happy taking sides. Often in conflicts he would be cut adrift, trying to make good with everyone. Occasionally he would succeed in making peace, sometimes he was just stuck on the edges until whatever had happened blew over. In that moment Eddie didn't know what he was going to say, but he still found himself surprised when Ben did speak up.

"Even if IT is back," he said. "Why do we have to do anything?"

"Because we made a promise," Mike said.

"What good did stopping IT do any of us the last time?" Ben said. "This town is still evil. Bill's brother didn't come back just because we got revenge."

"We saved Bev," Bill said.

"Bev's not here," Ben said.

"So screw everyone else?" Mike said. "Everyone here is so stupid and ignorant and undeserving of salvation that we -- we all just deserve to be left to tear ourselves apart? You're leaving, so the rest of us can go hang?"

A silence fell over the group when the five of them who had plans in other states, on other sides of the country, who were all secure in the knowledge that they were one day going to turn their backs on this place, reckoned with the fact that one of their number did not.

Mike stood up and looked at them all with something on his face that was as close to actual contempt that Eddie had ever seen from him.

"I never thought you were selfish before, any of you," he said. "But this is really making me rethink."

"No one in Derry ever did anything for any of us,” Ben said. “It’s not selfless to keep trying to protect them, it’s stupid.”

"I'm stupid now?" Mike said, his voice impatient, as if he was digging for an answer he'd been waiting to hear for a long time.

"I didn't say that," Ben said, retracting into himself defensively, his tone turning clipped and sullen. "But you really think anyone in this town would do what we did for us?"

"It doesn't  _ matter _ ," Bill said. "We're not them. We're better than they are."

Obviously feeling things were going too smoothly, Richie threw a bomb into the conversation.

"Yeah, God forbid you don't get another chance to be the big hero," Richie said.

Bill and Mike both turned on him then, the united front. They were between Richie and Eddie and now had their backs to Eddie; he could see Richie's face but not theirs and a surge of panic rose in him. He was too separate from Richie, and that meant he couldn't protect him -- who would look after Richie when his big mouth got him into trouble and Eddie wasn't around?

"You think that's what this is?" Bill said. "That I want to be  _ the hero?" _

"Yeah I do. I think you know when we all get out of here none of us are going to be  _ shit _ and you're scared that you're not gonna have anyone following you around anymore," Richie said.

The Losers did not ever really fight, not actually. Eddie had  _ heard _ from Bev that Bill had punched Richie once, but he hadn't seen it. Eddie had, of course, been in the ER with his mother screaming the building down about how he was going to be permanently disfigured while he, calm in a cold, disconnected way that the doctor had recognised as shock, sat and waited for them to put the cast on. Bev had told him about Richie spouting off about Georgie -- the most taboo subject of all, even now -- and Eddie had found that slightly surprising at the time. It was normal for Richie to be talking shit, of course, they called him Trashmouth for a good reason, but he had always had his limits. He had always been mollified by the things that were too sensitive to touch, dancing around the edges of Bill's hope that Georgie might still be alive without ever daring to disrupt what they were all sure was denial. Richie said shit that was thoughtless, rude, sometimes even downright mean. But he never set out to hurt his friends. Eddie had been taken aback by the idea he'd push Bill, who they had all known was holding back on a lot of things like a quiet storm, to the point of physical violence. He hadn't understood why Richie had gone so far back then, and had wondered if he'd been there he might've stopped it.

It didn't occur to him for a little while that of course, if he was there, safe and with the rest of them, Richie wouldn't have felt the need to lash out at all. The puzzle pieces of why that might be the case sat around in Eddie's mind, but he didn't dare slot together the tiles of  _ I wasn't there because I was hurt  _ and  _ Richie was angry because I wasn't there _ to see the image they spelled out.

Standing there in the Barrens, Eddie was not scared that Bill and Richie would fight again, because he thought, simply, that he would stop it. But he couldn't stop Richie from  _ saying  _ things that were going to hurt and they all knew that sometimes the things you said were worse than the bruises. He tried desperately to gesture for Richie to shut the fuck up, but Richie wasn't looking at him. The thought raged in Eddie's head again,  _ how can I protect you when you're not looking at me. _

"So you think I asked for what happened?" Bill said, his voice rising loud, furious. A bird shot out of the tree overhead, leaves rustling. "You think I'm  _ glad  _ all that happened? Just so I could get a fucking shot at being a hero? You think I look back at it all and go  _ that was worth it?" _

"Last time Eddie and Stan nearly  _ died _ and Bev got taken and --" Richie said, the anger in his voice clattering against Bill's.

Something in Eddie's chest jarred. Richie's words collided with the logic of the reality that Eddie had been living in and the result was ugly.

Richie thought he had to protect  _ him? _

Eddie, at a loss for words, turned and started walking away. Without saying anything Stan followed, the two of them making their way through the underbrush. The sound of them leaving was enough to grab the attention of the other three, who all turned to see them leaving. Richie broke away from the argument and dashed after Eddie.

"Where are you going?" He said.

"Home," Eddie said. "I don't need to hang out with you to be around someone who thinks I can't look after myself."

He might as well have slapped Richie, who stared at him with an open mouth, his big blue eyes stunned wide and hurt. He stopped dead in his tracks. Eddie couldn't look at his upset face and turned away again, stomping through the grass and back in the direction of civilisation. Richie did not follow, neither did Bill or Mike, the three of them swallowed up by the trees sooner rather than later as Eddie walked away.

Ben was trailing after them as well, but there was nothing particularly proud about the way he looked and before they made it all the way out of the woods Eddie realised that at some point he had silently broken away from them and vanished down some other footpath, vanishing into the foliage. There was a stripe of guilt that came from that, branded on Eddie's heart.

Stan broke off too eventually, stopping on the sidewalk where he needed to go left and Eddie had to go right, just before they both turned for home. They were right on the verge of entering back into the heart of Derry and there was the occasional person walking past, a car trundling down the road. Stan waited until someone walking a dog had turned a corner and vanished before he spoke; unwilling to have what they said overheard by anyone who might carry it to ears that weren't intended to hear it.

"What are you going to do?" Stan said. "If it is IT?"

"Kill IT again," Eddie said.

He had held onto the brief, very teenage, fantasy of spiriting himself away and not talking to his friends for a while, making himself something unreachable behind walls he had built. In this fantasy, he was like the dragon at the heart of a castle, something hot and angry with sharp teeth and fire that burned. It would be hard work to get to him; you would have to fight your way through the stone walls to get to him inside, and then when you got all the way in, the monster you found could defend himself perfectly well. Eddie wanted that so badly he believed it, for a little while. He had that unreachable part of himself inside, he was sure of it. It was a fantasy he clung to for a couple of days as he hung around the house, the only thing that stopped his jagged nerves from ripping himself apart as his mother crowed over his sudden transformation into a homebody.

"It's so nice to have you home with me," she said, smugness curling through her voice, catlike. "I miss having you around the house. I don't know what you get up to out there on your own."

Eddie, the mouse, peered through the bars of her claws and thought about how he knew the small spaces she didn't. He would get out alive. He slunk around the house for those few days, busying himself playing  _ EarthBound _ again, working his way through  _ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,  _ also a repeat venture, and watching the dreadful TV dramas that always seemed to be playing day and night, forming one incomprehensible mash of attractive people with trendy clothes and haircuts going through the tormentous cycles of death and loss and broken hearts. In the house was like being in a different universe, one that was sealed off and displaced from the rest of reality, where the logic was dictated by someone else and the rules that applied outside did not apply here. He was having recurring dreams about some place dark and deep, some dark high-walled room where he couldn't see the ceiling, where he was lost, far below the earth, only the sound of rushing water for company. He forgot them when he woke up, but the sensation stuck in the back of his mind like an underlying anxiety, as if he needed another one of those.

His fantasy castle ended up running short because Eddie may have built stone walls eighty foot high, but he hadn't accounted for something that was more determined and more crafty than stone and walls could ever be. Richie Tozier looked at the walls trying to keep him out and got down and dug his way underneath as if it was no work at all. It was nearly five days since he'd talked to Richie last and, clearly sick of the wait, Richie started digging his way back into Eddie's life.

It was the kind of damp and uninteresting day that made you forget it was summer at all, but Eddie was only walking to the drugstore, so he didn't really care. He was walking not driving because he was in no rush to get back home, but had nowhere in particular he wanted to be, either. He would just take his time wandering through the streets as if there was anything in Derry he actually cared to see. Under the grey skies he found that the town, which he disliked but normally at least had the decency to be a relatively nice  _ looking  _ place, turned even more grim than usual. It wasn't raining yet but it might soon, and it was dark for only 1PM, and the windows of the houses Eddie passed reflected back only vague grey shapes. Sometimes he would catch sight of his own reflection in a window or a glass door and would frown at himself, the shivering silhouette of his scrawny body, eyes like big black bruises in his bony face.

He saw the reflection of Richie before he saw the man himself; they were caricatures in the glass, too ill-defined for their features to be properly captured. In the glass, next to Eddie's thin, discoloured smudge, Richie was taller, made out of different shapes. He was all long blocky rectangles in unnatural colours, red and blue and orange. Eddie knew it was Richie before he even spoke.

"What are we looking at?" Richie said. "You planning a vacation?"

They were staring into the window of a travel agent. Eddie crooked his head to the side so he could look Richie in the eye. Richie smiled a wonky grin.

"I was thinking of getting out of here," Eddie said.

"Where to, sir?" Richie said, his voice becoming something else. Alfred the butler?

"Somewhere where people can't come bother me," Eddie said. "Unless they have an appointment and a really good reason."

"Absolutely, sir, very good too." Richie paused. His own voice returned. "Am I bothering you, Eds?"

They resumed walking down the street, slowly, Eddie taking the lead and Richie loping along after him, taking smaller steps than maybe he would if he were alone. Richie had his shoulders kind of hunched, hands fisted in the pocket of his ugly red windbreaker. He made himself so  _ small;  _ it was almost more amazing a change than any of his voices, the way he could fold up his body and appear like he was half his size. Eddie could forget, sometimes, that he wasn't bigger than Richie. That he wasn't literally the dragon he was sure was storming around the castle, snapping the arms of anyone who got too close, and couldn't coil his wings and tail around Richie's body.

"You've been bothering me since first grade," Eddie said.

"So, when you go away," Richie said. "Is this a vacation for one?"

"What kind of vacation do you take on your own?" Eddie said. "I'm not going to sit on the beach by myself."

Richie giggled. "A sandcastle made for one."

"I'd get pretty fucking bored if it was a one-man castle."

The pharmacy was coming up. Richie pulled a face at it, like he was being reminded of an unpleasant smell. He glanced sideways at Eddie, and Eddie looked back defiantly.

"Yes, I need to go in," he said, before Richie could ask.

"I just think you gave up all that stuff before," Richie said.

"It's complicated," Eddie said. He left Richie outside to go in, waiting at the counter until Greta Keene brought him the huge paper bag of his things, some of which he took, some of which he flushed.

He wondered if Greta Keene was going to take over the pharmacy when she grew up. She had shown no particular resistance to following in her father's footsteps, not that Eddie had ever known her well enough to dig into what her dreams might be. She was older and intimidating and a bully, so he'd always steered clear of her, wary of what she might say or do next. She had no interest in him that day, her face almost aggressively bored, which only made him wonder more why she didn't want to get out of here. Was she just resigned to her future? No one else would run her dad's pharmacy when he passed so she was ready to keep working in the same place she had been since she was a kid? There was a kind of strange complicity in her, Eddie thought, as he left the store. She saw what Derry was like, the dark undercurrent that ran through the town, and allowed herself to sink into and become part of it. It was similar to Bowers, or Beverly's father, though those were obviously monsters of a different stripe. People who just saw what the town offered and became absorbed in it, no resistance to the evil that consumed them. It was the little things like that, Eddie thought, that made Derry so terrible. You made small concessions and that started the slow erosion until you were turning your eyes away from the suffering that was all around you. 

Outside, Richie had crossed the street and was now smoking a cigarette and throwing stones at a glass bottle someone had left in the alley opposite Keene's. He didn't have great aim. A memory of Bev and her golden arm rolled through Eddie's mind, the memories of the seven of them playing an impromptu game of baseball with some of the other kids they knew sitting in the back of his mind. In that summer memory, Beverly stretched her arm back before the throw, the sun catching her hair, so much like fire, frozen in that moment for a golden eternity. There were worse things to remember one of your best friends for. It was sad their friendship had burned out, but those things happened, Eddie figured.

Even though he told himself that, he felt sickly trying to accept it as truth. It felt  _ wrong,  _ the thought that the seven of them wouldn't love each other forever. Sure, Stan himself had pointed out that it wasn't normal to hang around with all the people you knew in middle school, and Eddie didn't. He had other friends he'd known in middle school or younger that he didn't talk to anymore, but they had never been _ Losers.  _ It wasn't comparable. Saying he no longer talked to James Bevins from second grade sounded fine. Saying he no longer talked to Beverly Marsh felt like saying he no longer talked to family.

"You have the worst aim," Eddie said to Richie.

"I can't help it, it's my eyes," Richie said. He took his glasses off and placed them on Eddie's head, to demonstrate how poor his eyesight was. And it was truly hopeless; maybe cruelly Eddie felt relieved he didn't have bad eyes, because Richie's glasses turned the world into a kaleidoscopic fog and weighed a metric tonne.

Without them, there was something oddly naked and vulnerable about Richie's face. His eyes, always big and slightly bug-like, looked strangely too small. It was odd how much they changed the proportions of his head. Eddie slipped the glasses back onto Richie's face.

"You gotta have the shittiest vision in the state," Eddie said.

"If they get much worse I'll be legally blind," Richie said, oddly chirpy about something that Eddie knew would frighten him horribly. Most people who wore glasses had eyes that slowly decayed over time, vision growing worse, and Eddie was glad again that he didn't have to deal with that. He didn't think he'd ever stop worrying about it.

When he took his hands away from Richie's face he allowed his fingers to brush over Richie's curls. It was far from the first time he had done so, but every time Eddie extracted a moment of private intimacy like this he found his heart jumped into his throat again. Somehow it never grew boring. There was still a warm trail where Richie's fingers had brushed over the sides of his face and he hoped, vaguely, it wouldn't disappear.

Richie beamed at him in that way he did sometimes, and Eddie thought, with a sense of emotion that was not joy or resentment or resignation so much as it was just total acceptance, that when Richie was there the dragon in the high castle was not a raging beast but a lapdog. How frustrating and how completely obviously predictable of him.

"Look," Eddie said.

"Good thing you gave me my glasses back," Richie said. "What am I looking at?"

"No, listen."

"Am I looking or listening?"

Eddie groaned and Richie giggled again.

"I don't need you to protect me, alright?" Eddie said. Richie looked puzzled but he forged ahead before he could be interrupted, holding up his hand to emphasise the importance of his points. "We beat IT before, all of us. If IT's back again then we'll beat IT again. I'm not going to be left behind or the one who gives up, ok? I'm not the baby of the group, I'm not the weak one. I did it before, I can do it again. I don't need anyone to protect me and I'm not going to have you tell me I'm too weak or--"

"I don't think you're weak," Richie said. There was a force with which he said it that startled Eddie a little. It was said not to console him, it was not a nice white lie. Richie really believed it, and would not allow the misconception that he didn't believe in Eddie Kaspbrak stand.

"Then why are you worrying about me but not the others?" Eddie said.

Richie stared at him, brows furrowed. He had tensed up so much that Eddie could see the muscle that stood out in his jaw sometimes when he was especially unhappy. His lips twitched like he was going to say something, but no words came out, just staring ahead.

"I'm... I'm not," was all Richie said. It was not convincing.

Eddie wanted to argue with him, but he didn't know what he was arguing against.

"We..." He said. He drifted back to his old argument, by default. "I can beat IT again. We have to. And I need you, too."

Something went incredibly still in Richie's face. Eddie couldn't have guessed in a hundred years what Richie was actually thinking because it was like every single signal that he had learned, all the tiny quirks and indicators of Richie's he knew off by heart all melted away in an instant. Richie's face was placid and smooth like the surface of the quarry before someone dived in, but his eyes were fixed on Eddie with a startling level of intensity and Eddie found that his mind had gone completely blank.

"What do you mean?" Richie said, voice quiet.

"We... It..." Eddie struggled for words. What the fuck  _ did _ he mean? What did he mean, other than that he needed Richie the way he needed his left arm? "It... It's gotta be all seven of us, right? To beat IT? Or it doesn't work."

Richie's face, as impassive as the grave, did not shift a single muscle.

"Right," he said.

A need to look away, at anything else, surged through Eddie and he tore his eyes away from Richie and stared down the street at nothing in particular instead. He started walking vaguely away, Richie loping after him obediently, though he had no particular plan for where he was going. He simply began to walk.

Eddie knew Derry like he knew the cracks in the ceiling of his bedroom, like he knew the pattern of freckles on his own arms, like he knew the little signals of Richie's face. It was ingrained in his brain in a way that meant it was near impossible for him to get lost. He never had, even as a little kid, was able to know the right way and more than that, know the faster way. Richie, who was perpetually on the verge of being semi-lost, happily relied on him. All of the Losers had, ever since they were very small. Ben had found the pit they used as their clubhouse, but Eddie had been the first one of them to find the safest routes in and out of the Barrens, the one who had figured out how to climb around the fences that warded kids away from the quarry. He had just known the way to go with an instinctive self-assurance he often lacked in other parts of his life.

Today he surged down the street because he felt overwhelmed by the need to walk  _ somewhere _ , without any idea where exactly it was he was going to or why he was going there, other than the fact that he had to be someplace that wasn't his awful, dusty house. The sun was starting to break through the clouds and Eddie vaguely headed in that direction, following the long lines of the cloud banks like he was following an arrow on a map. And, without feeling the need to question where Eddie Kaspbrak might lead him, Richie followed. He simply trusted him.

"Have you beat  _ EarthBound _ again yet?" Richie said.

"No," Eddie said. "Why?"

"Just wondering." Richie flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter and smiled at some private joke.  _ Enjoy the garbage, clown. _

The way they were walking was vaguely off-centre of Main Street, along the edge of the heart of the town, with its ugly statue and parade route, and where a few smaller stores squatted on the street, mostly ones that had held the same positions for longer than Eddie could remember. Along and in between them sat houses and the few apartment blocks Derry had, smaller buildings than the kinds of skyscrapers Eddie was going to have to get used to seeing in New York. He wondered if he was going to live in an apartment building. Probably, right? He had seen enough episodes of  _ Seinfeld  _ and  _ Friends _ and  _ Taxi _ to have what he thought was a pretty clear impression of what New York was like, which was to say it was a far more interesting and dynamic place than Derry.

The clouds were starting to clear and there was sunlight dappling the road ahead. One small stretch of Derry actually looked like it existed in the summer, light glinting off the windows of the apartment buildings, the leaves of the trees that grew along the banks of the river glinting in the sunlight. There was a small bridge up ahead, one that led over to the other side of town, the side that Eddie's mother would always spin wildly alarming stories about, the one where The Falcon sat, not far from the big bus station that would take people away from Derry. The exits out of the world that Eddie had been trapped in for his entire life and had grown tired of, but not ones that he would ever take. He had his own plans.

He understood they were walking past Beverly's old apartment again and he came to a slow stop on the sidewalk, looking vaguely at her old building. Curtains twitched in the window he knew had once been her bedroom, overlooking the street. The brightness of the sun outside made it impossible to see into the building, so whoever was in there was anyone's guess. Richie stopped and looked up at it too.

"Can't wait until we all get the hell out of here," Richie said. "Beverly had the right idea."

Eddie thought about Richie being a hundred miles away and answering the phone with an uninterested, confused tone, puzzled as to why Eddie would be calling him at all, and his stomach clenched with fear.

He wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say. He wanted the future, he wanted the going, he wanted to run. He loved to run, loved to feel himself racing to the finish line, away from the starting point. Not for the first time he wished he knew what he was running  _ to. _

In the end he didn't say anything, though. Someone was walking out of the front of the building with a box of old junk in her arms, carrying it to the large station wagon parked by the sidewalk. She was short and wearing an oversized purple sweater and scruffy jeans with holes in the knees, and her hair was cut jaggedly short, though it was starting to grow out into a frizzy red cloud that surrounded her head in half-curls, the sunlight catching it making it look gold. She dumped the box in the trunk of the car next to a few others, the evidence of a morning's work. Eddie understood, though he did not truly understand how he had known to do so, why he had come this way.

She looked a little different, but not all that much. Not enough to stop the recognition from being instantaneous, striking Eddie with the force of a well-thrown baseball to the skull. He stood with his mouth agape, and she would have vanished back into the building and been lost from them again if it wasn't Richie who managed to speak.

"Bev?" Richie said.

Beverly Marsh stopped dead on the street and looked at them, and there was no hint of recognition in her eyes. The blankness in her face was the most frightening thing Eddie had ever seen.

_ "Bev," _ Richie said again, a little more insistently.

"Hello?" She said.

"I haven't changed that much, right?" Richie said, smiling crookedly at her, his eyes suddenly desperate in a way that was wholly unfamiliar for him.

Beverly stared at him, looked at Eddie, frowned a little. Then something hit her, like a light had switched on and connections were being remade, the circuit inside her brain suddenly lighting into life.

"Richie?" She said. "Eddie?"

"Hi," Eddie said.

"Long time no see, Molly Ringwald," Richie said. "Are you too good to write now? They don't have phones in Portland?"

She blinked at him and fear shot through Eddie again. The connection had been made, she knew them, but it was like the pieces hadn't all fallen into place. She didn't know what she knew them for. She didn't know why it mattered.

"Bev," Eddie said again.

He held up his hand to show her the scar on his palm, like he was holding up an identification card. She stared at it and then, slowly, her eyes widened and something dawned across her face. She raised her own hand and there, in the middle of her palm, was a long, thin scar. She looked at it like she had not noticed it was there before, her eyebrows drawn tight over her fearful green eyes. After a moment she looked back at Eddie and Richie, her mouth devoid of words, unable to find anything that could fill up the void of knowledge and explain everything that she didn't understand.

"I have to go," is what she said. "I have to go help my aunt."

There was a woman walking out of the building who Eddie vaguely recognised as being the same woman who had stolen Beverly out of their lives several years ago. She looked a great deal like Beverly, though older, and there was something very sceptical about the way she looked at the two of them. It was slightly defensive, like she didn't know why they were being bothered by two stray young men who apparently didn't meet up to snuff in her eyes.

"We'll see you around then," Eddie said clumsily, wanting very badly to be out of the conversation and away from the hard eyes of Beverly's aunt.

"Maybe," Bev said. She flexed the scarred hand. "I'm not going to be in town long."

"About your dad," Richie said.

Eddie and Beverly both froze dead in their tracks then. Eddie looked at him with huge and fearful eyes, waiting to hear what the hell it was that Richie was going to say next.

"I'm not sorry he's dead," Richie said.

The aunt made a soft, startled sound, like she didn't know how to handle the audacity of what she'd just heard, but Beverly's face went still, something smoothing out of it.

"Neither am I," Eddie said.

He wanted, then, for there to be some great change, a sudden trigger that would flip and she would throw her arms around them and cry and say she was so happy that they were there, that she remembered it all now and knew of course that they were her friends, the best ones she'd ever had. In the gloomy summer afternoon, the shadows of the clouds drifting by hung over them, no wind to blow them away.

Beverly didn't react at all. Her hand flexed again, but she didn't have anything to say to them. Richie grabbed Eddie by the arm and hauled him away with such force that Eddie nearly dropped his bag of prescriptions, the paper crinkling in his hands. Bev glanced at it with a slightly perturbed look on her face, but she turned away without saying anything more and vanished back inside the building.

Her aunt stared after them as they left, hurrying down the sidewalk. Eddie looked over his shoulder and wondered, for a moment, if there was something he could or should say to her, but he didn't trust adults generally and he knew that this one didn't trust him. It was slightly odd to be looked at and know that someone thought of you as a danger. Oddly, it reminded him a little of Richie's mother.

The two of them rushed back the way they'd come. Richie's shoulders were hugged up so high and his head so low it was like he was doing everything he could to stop himself from curling up in the middle of the street, of his body just crumpling up and blowing away in the wind like so many dry leaves. He had his hands slammed as deep as they would go into the pocket of his coat and marched down the street at such a clip that Eddie was having to trot to keep up with him. Eddie, without really thinking about it, took hold of Richie's hand to get him to slow down.

Richie startled at the sudden contact, looking as if Eddie had unexpectedly slapped him rather than touched him as a friend would. He ripped his hand away from Eddie, staring at him with something in his face that looked oddly like betrayal, as if he couldn't believe Eddie would do something to him like that.

"Why didn't she remember us?" Eddie said.

"She did," Richie said. "She just didn't care."

That was worse. That was so much worse. Beverly knew them, knew them deeply. Eddie had been able to talk to her in a way that he hadn't ever with the others; the two of them had a link that none of the others did. For one summer he'd had someone who, when he told that he didn't want to go home, would know he didn't mean just because he didn't want to do his homework. That had been lost almost as quickly as it had come, but there were still things he had told Beverly he had never told anyone; he had given her his childish understanding of things he was going through that he hadn't had the mind or the language to really explain, and the idea that she hadn't just forgotten, but didn't see them worthy of caring about.

"That's what happens," Richie said.

"What do you mean?" Eddie asked, a little startled. He felt a little like Richie had just told him they were both suffering from a highly infectious disease, one that there was no known cure for.

"Isn't it?" Richie said. "People go away and they stop caring. They go... They grow up and they stop caring and they forget about all this... Stupid kid shit."

"Nuh-uh," Eddie said, like a kid.

Richie laughed then, kind of wildly, in a way Eddie didn't like. "Yeah they do! Even Bev did.”

Eddie wanted to say

"I won't."

But the words didn't come easily. All that came was the swelling balloon of fear in his throat that said

_ But what if you do. _

He hesitated and maybe it was the hesitation that was the final straw because Richie left then, and he did not invite Eddie to go with him


	6. 5: You're always going

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: drug use (LSD) heavily discussed in this chapter

Eddie knew he had to tell the others Beverly had come back, but he didn't know exactly how or when to do it. It was a conversation he had never imagined himself having; in the fantasies of reuniting with Bev he'd had over the years, they had always been clear cut. Bev would see them and run to them and they would all hug and the friendships would continue as if no time had passed at all, as if someone had simply hit play and taken their lives off pause. Even after they had all silently agreed to stop talking to Bev, after the calls had died away because she had stopped recognising their voices on the phone, he had hoped that when they saw each other things would start again as if they had never stopped.

He didn't know how he could tell the others she had simply stopped caring. He didn't know how he was supposed to tell Ben that she had looked right through them and not seen something she thought mattered.

Richie had not elected to tell the others himself and Eddie was quietly glad of that, because he didn't think that anyone would like the finality of the nuclear bomb that Richie was going to throw at them. He hadn't been able to talk to Richie about it either. Richie had responded to the situation by becoming wildly unreasonable and getting his hands on a lot of acid.

Eddie didn't know where the acid came from; if he had to wager a guess, it would be via Ilana, who treated drugs like they were accessories and seemed to have at least a passing familiarity with everything. Alarmingly to Eddie, Richie had always looked at the stories she passed on to them of partying and misadventures with open jealousy, so it wasn't really all that surprising that he'd go and do a bunch of drugs on his own when he had the opportunity.

It was gone eleven at night when Eddie found out about it. He was in his room when the phone rang, the noise of the phone clattering through the house jarring him awake from the half-doze he'd been in. The phone ringing at night felt, to Eddie, like a pretty bad omen. No one rang at nearly midnight because they had something good to tell you, unless you were waiting on a baby to be born or to hear Happy New Year from a distant relative.

He still went for it quickly, though, because he didn't want it to wake his mother up. She was still asleep, he was pretty sure, but he answered the phone in a low, breathless whisper.

"Hello?" He said.

There was an odd crunching breathing noise on the other end. Eddie was suddenly, irrationally, reminded of the movie  _ When a Stranger Calls _ _,_ despite the fact he was definitely not a babysitter who was at risk of getting murdered. The only person who had tried to murder him was in Juniper Hill asylum, and he was pretty sure Pennywise didn't use phones. Like, at least eighty percent sure.

But that didn't mean other people in Derry wouldn't do something. Other people in Derry were, historically, awful and dangerous.

"Who is this?" He said.

The breathing rasped on the line, then someone coughed.

"I'm hanging up," Eddie said.

"Wait," the voice said. "Eds."

"Richie?"

There was some kind of clattering around on the other end. Eddie could hear other voices, not just Richie's which was oddly slow and distorted, but also some unfamiliar ones, that sounded pretty pissed off.

"Hello?" Someone else said, a new voice.

"Hello?" Eddie said. "What's going on?"

"Do you know this guy? Because he says he knows you and he's fuckin' stoned out of his mind and I need to get him out of my house but there's no way he can drive. He broke the window. My mom is gonna be so pissed."

The other guy sounded about their age, but Eddie didn't know him. He sounded more worried than he did genuinely angry. In the distance Richie slurred the name  _ Eds  _ distantly a few times and then started disjointedly rambling about something else, lost over the poor quality of the phone line.

"Where are you?" Eddie said. "I'll come get him."

The guy sighed with obvious relief, but the address he gave was in Orono and was going to be over an hour trip, which made Eddie grit his teeth in frustration. He didn't take back the offer, though. 

He grabbed his sneakers and a jacket and spared a glance up the stairs, wondering what his mom would say if she woke up and found he'd snuck out of the house. For a brief and horrible second something in the back of his mind said  _ if you stay you won't get in trouble. You won't upset her. _

It would be easier to stay. It would save him a lot of problems. If his mom woke up and found that he'd snuck out of the house and driven three towns over to save a boy she hated from a house party because he was too high to drive himself back there was no telling what she would do. He could imagine her blotchy, tear-streaked face already, her voice wailing as she cried about how badly he'd betrayed her. She loved to use her tears to hurt him, and she would want him to feel every ounce of the pain she felt at him leaving her so afraid like this. She might never speak to him again. She might burn all his things. She might have him institutionalised. She might have Richie arrested.

All these things rushed through Eddie's head but he was already in his car and peeling away from the sidewalk before he could really decide what he would do if he got caught. He would simply just have to hope he didn't.

He hadn't driven to Orono often, just a couple of times when he was still thinking about if he'd apply to the University of Maine before deciding it was too close to feel safe, but he didn't have any trouble finding his way. He didn't think he'd ever driven this late, and the land looked unfamiliar under the dark sky and the shimmer of stars that hung over the parts of Maine that weren't so burdened by the troublesome population of people clogging up the skyline with their houses. He found something about the vast emptiness between places oppressive. There was so much empty space, so much land where it would be so easy to get lost. He was glad he never got lost.

He took the I-95 there, cruising along the highway. He knew that the I-95 ran almost all the way down the coast, over 3,000 miles. He knew that if he wanted to, he could turn the car around and drive south all the way to Florida. He knew that in a few months he would take the I-95 south until it met the 295 and he would follow that, intersecting with the 495 and the 290 and a dozen other roads until he finally met the 95 again before he reached New York. He knew that one day this road would take him just as far as he wanted to go. Right then, he wanted Richie.

He had to slow and drive at a crawl when he got to Orono. The landmarks he'd gotten from the kid on the phone had been vague and unhelpful ("Turn left at like, the tree"), so he squinted at street signs he couldn't read from the driver's seat until he realised that there was a house on the block he was passing where there was someone leaning against a tree in the front yard and he knew, even though he was the other end of the street, that it was Richie. He would probably know Richie if he was blind or dead.

When he stopped out front of the house he found that Richie was standing and swaying gently in place, but he lurched suddenly into wakefulness when he saw Eddie's car.

"Eds?" He said, his voice pitched in a way like he was hopeful but afraid of being wrong.

"Yeah, you big fucking idiot," Eddie said. "What the fuck are you doing? Why the hell are you all the way out here?"

"Uh," Richie said. "Hi?"

"Get in the car."

Richie took a worried step forward. For a second Eddie wondered if he remembered how to walk. Someone was standing in the doorway of the house staring at him and muttering to another guy in the house. Eddie raised a hand in hello, but neither of them waved back. He was filled with the impression that it was probably best to get the hell out of dodge before someone lost the last tiny bit of patience they had that was stopping them from beating the hell out of Richie.

Richie tried the driver's side door first before Eddie barked a no at him and then he managed to find his way around to the passenger seat. He slumped in it like he'd very suddenly had all of his strings cut and looked at Eddie with big, liquid blue eyes like a particularly upset puppy. Eddie couldn't look at him. He glanced back at the angry men and decided he didn't want to have to deal with them. He knew that they were probably just other stupid kids, but he hated them, in the irrational, impersonal way you hated someone who took too long counting out their change in line at the store, or who got the last drink you wanted from the vending machine.

The look on Richie's face was growing increasingly anxious as Eddie turned the car around so he could drive them both back out of town and towards home. He kept glancing at Eddie and then down at his hands, which were fidgeting restlessly like they were little birds in his lap. Eddie was faintly worried he might cry.

"How did you end up all the way out here?" Eddie said.

"Are you mad at me?" Richie said.

Eddie was so distracted by this he completely forgot his own question.

"No?" He said. It hadn't really occurred to him to be mad at Richie.

"Your face is all kinda like..." Richie made a face. It wasn't flattering.

"If you're going to be a dick you can walk," Eddie said.

"No, no, I'm not being a dick. I'm not being a dick about your beautiful face. Honestly. Really."

Richie reached out very tentatively to grab Eddie's arm and seemed very unsure about where exactly he should be touching, his hand hovering up and down his arm with a look of immense concentration on his face. Eddie glanced at him sidelong as they stopped at a red light.

"What are you on?" Eddie said.

"Acid," Richie said. "Do you want some?"

"No! Where the fuck did you get acid?"

Richie blinked at him like he didn't understand the question and then produced a small baggie with a couple of tabs from his jeans pocket.

"From here," he said, helpfully.

"I literally can't even tell if you're joking right now."

"Is that not what you meant?" He said.

"No, just... Forget it. Are you ok? Like, do you feel sick?" Eddie didn't think you could OD on acid like you could on those scarier drugs, like heroin or cocaine, but he was pretty sure it could make you crazy. Didn't it fry your brain? He kept thinking about eggs getting dropped and the idea of that being someone's head was alarming.

"No, I feel pretty good," Richie said. He smiled then, very suddenly, like he'd realised that he was actually happy. Eddie frowned at him and his face dropped again.

"Why are you all the way out here?" Eddie said.

"I heard from... Uh, I think Nickie at work, that her cousin was having a party and I just... You know... Wanted to go out," Richie said.

"Why didn't you bring anyone with you? What if something happened?"

"Something did happen, so I called you."

"Yeah, but what if something really bad happened?"

Richie screwed his face up again, like he was really trying to weigh up the plausibility of this.

"I wasn't even in Derry, how bad could it be?" He said.

"What if... You hurt yourself?" Eddie said. "What if you got in a fight? What if you were so high you walked into a fucking road and got hit by a goddamn car and died. Or that kid who took acid and thought he could fly and he jumped off a roof and he died. I heard about that from Kelly, she said it happened to one of her brother's friends.”

Richie laughed, the harsh noise of it making Eddie jump.

"I'm not gonna  _ die _ _,"_ he said, as if the idea was so ludicrous that Eddie might as well have suggested he shouldn't take acid because he might _literally_ turn into a bird and fly away.

"Oh, well that's ok then." Eddie's voice dripped sarcasm. "If you're just never going to die."

"You said you weren't mad." Richie glared then, his good mood dissolving into sulky childish anger like he'd been dropped in a bucket of water.

"I'm not mad, I'm disappointed."

"Ok, Mom."

"Don't call me that. That's not fucking funny."

The way Eddie snapped was so fast it killed the last strand of any good will that might have been salvageable and Richie folded in on himself again, sliding down the back of the chair like he didn't have the strength to hold himself upright anymore. He stared out of the window as the lights on the interstate flashed by, though his eyes were fixed upwards, like he was watching the heaven.

For a long while, no one said anything. For Eddie it was easy to just concentrate on the road instead, staring ahead and letting his mind be taken over by the automatic thoughts about driving. It was Richie who spoke again.

"I killed a god when I was a kid," he said.

"And it didn't change anything," Eddie said.

"It didn’t change them. It changed us," Richie said.

Eddie didn't know what to say to that. He kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. He could stay safe if he just followed the rules of the road. Driving down down the roads that twisted between suburbs, farmland and empty, wild countryside, Eddie wondered if this might be the last time he ever drove this road. He didn't go to Orono often, didn't think there would be another reason to pass it by before he left town in a little while. He probably wouldn't drive this way before he left and then he might never drive the route from Orono to Derry again. He had no way of knowing where the future would take him and considering his current plan of never returning to Derry again, that meant there had to be a last time he did everything. There would be a last time he went to Keene's Pharmacy and a last time he went to the Barrens. There would be a last time he walked out of his front door, and a last time he saw his friends again.

That one hurt.

Above them the stars were splayed in brilliant white contrast to the dark sky. There were constellations, but Eddie didn't know them. Stan knew them, and Mike could tell you what they meant, and Ben knew which ones applied to the time you were born. Eddie just thought they looked nice. Right then though he had no time to appreciate what he was looking at; he could only stare ahead at the black asphalt and think about how he was carrying Richie home safely. He was. Richie had called him for help and he'd helped.

As they got closer to Derry the skyline began to change as buildings popped into vision. They both knew it too well for it to be any kind of excitement to them, and no one had ever known relief upon seeing the first few squat farmhouses that alerted you to the fact you were entering Derry territory, not since the very first settlers that invaded had built their shitty little village on the stolen land.

"What the fuck is that?" Richie said.

He was looking vaguely in the direction of the Kitchner Ironworks. Eddie didn't really know the full history of it off the top of his head, but Mike had filled him in on the details of how it had once, in the 1800s, exploded and killed dozens of visiting families. The idea of it had horrified the then-thirteen year old Eddie, but over the years had settled into his mind as just another one of the awful things that happened in Derry since the place had been founded and infected by something deeply evil.

Not for the first time, Eddie thought about how improbable and stupid and arbitrary and at the same time how obvious it was that something that was evil manifested in solid form would make its home in the middle of rural Maine for no reason at all.

"It's the Ironworks," Eddie said, glancing at it but focusing on where they were headed.

"Oh," Richie said. "Why's it on fire?"

Eddie's head jerked over to it, allowing his concentration to lapse while they were on this particular long, straight stretch of road.

The Kitchner Ironworks had smoke billowing from the top of it. The smoke drifted up into the stars and dissipated amongst them.

His first thought, much as Richie's had been, was that it was on fire. But he realised very quickly that the smoke was flowing from the tall chimneys that rose out of the building. Tall chimneys that had, over a hundred years ago, been broken down and collapsed into the ground as an explosion had shaken it, leaving only small juts of brick. They stood now, full and proud, and Eddie stared without any idea why.

The next thing they noticed was the noise. From the building came the clattering of machinery and the grinding of metal, a mechanical life that Eddie had never heard before, had died before the universe had even thought he needed to be born.

"It's awake," Eddie said.

The car had slowed to a crawl. The road was very empty and very quiet; the air was filled with the noise of the factory and the silence of the town and eventually Eddie slowed enough that he needed to pull over, the car drifting to the side of the road and stopping by the barrier.

Richie climbed out first, clambering over the barrier to the scruffy grassland by the side of the road. Eddie followed him, worried he would do something stupid and end up falling ass over head down the bank on the side or something equally ridiculous. He was staring up at the Ironworks, at the smoke rising in thick grey pillars that got lost amongst the darkness of the sky. The noise, when they were out of the car, was tremendous.

"Is that real?" Richie said.

"No," Eddie said, "I don't think so."

"But you see it too?"

"Yeah."

Through the drifting smoke Eddie thought he could see things. As the smoke brushed over the stars, they formed patterns. The patterns fractalled out into spirals that promised even more complicated patterns deeper inside, too confusing for the human eye to follow.

Richie grabbed Eddie's hand. 

Eddie let him. Lights flickered on in the ironworks, windows lighting up in brief flashes of yellow and orange, as though someone was wandering in and out of rooms trying to remember what they were looking for, where they left it. Richie's hand was warm and dry in Eddie's and Eddie wished that his own wasn't kind of sweaty and clammy. He wished that Richie had let him hold his hand in the street the other day. He wished Richie wasn't so adverse to touch sometimes, ducking out of reach like a cat that was unsure of your intentions. Eddie wished for a lot of things, standing by the side of the road with Richie's hand in his, but he didn't say any of them aloud.

The light of the stars above Richie's face stripped the colour from him; in the distant light he was a blend of pale skin and black, black hair, and his eyes looked grey. His gaze was fixed firmly on the ironworks, pupils wandering as he followed the billowing smoke rising into the dark sky. Eddie looked down at their joined hands. His hands were smaller than Richie's, obviously, and his arms were leaner. A spray of freckles up the back of his forearms looked like their own little constellation in the darkness. He wished he knew what he looked like through someone else's eyes. When Eddie looked at himself he saw how bony his angles were, how his face and body were sharp lines, drawn tight like a bundle of cords, thrumming with nervous energy. Was that what everyone saw? The strange, mousy little kid who was shaking with electric nerves? Was that what Richie saw?

Richie was not looking at him. Eddie wished he was.

Eddie looked back at the smoke plumes rising. In the criss-cross pattern of star light through the smoke, things moved. A part of him said that he was just tired, seeing things, and part of him knew that he was old enough to know better than that now. He blinked and looked at Richie, but Richie was pointing at something in the highest peak of the clouds and Eddie followed the line of his finger to the very edges of the curling smoke.

Something was swimming there. Like staring through murky water he had trouble making out the shape of it, only able to see the way the darkness and light played around the edges of something vast that swam in the places he couldn't see. Fear clutched Eddie's heart and he gripped at Richie's arm again.

"Let's go," he said.

"You're always going," Richie said, nonsensically, but he let Eddie tug him back to the car.

He kept looking over his shoulder as they walked, back at the ironworks as it screamed its metallic ghostly wail over the quiet township. The sound made the bones inside Eddie's ears rattle and he wanted to cry  _ how can't that be real? _ but he knew that the reality of things was not always a yes or no question. Sometimes things weren't real and they hurt anyway.

He gave the ironworks one last look. The thing swimming in the clouds was twisting at the edges and Eddie watched the way some long limb -- fin? -- struggled and he had, very briefly, the thought that someone was drowning, but then Richie opened the car door and he glanced away for one second and then the silence was so sudden it was like a vacuum had opened up and nothing could fill the space, the rising quiet of the world hitting him like the air rushing out of his lungs, ears ringing.

Richie was frozen in place too, night colourless eyes wide in his face. Eddie heard when Richie breathed in, sharp and hard, like he had forgotten how, the noise the only sound on the empty country road.

They both looked back at the ironworks, but there was nothing there but the concrete shell that remained, wall jutting a few metres out of the ground, the interior long ago stripped bare of anything that defined what the building had once been. Now it was just a monument to the idea that something had happened here once, too distant in the past for it to mean anything to anyone but maybe a story a grandfather might have told them once. Whatever had been swimming amongst the stars was gone now, vanishing into the void between as if it had been blown away on the high wind, leaving no trace that it had ever been there except in Richie and Eddie's shared memory.

The two of them got back into the car and left as quickly as they could. Eddie's foot was heavy on the gas until they reached town, slipping past the houses on the edges of Derry town proper and into the familiar tangle of streets and white clapboard houses that made up so many of the buildings in town. He did not feel particularly comforted to be home. He never did, really.

They drove past Bill's house, with its trees in the yard, its years of cold and lonely memories and its FOR SALE sign stuck in the front lawn like an ill omen.

"There's a shield," Richie said. Eddie tried to work out what he meant but reminded himself that Richie was high and probably didn't know what he meant himself, so said nothing and just kept driving towards Richie's house.

He continued on this way until Richie suddenly yelled for him to stop and Eddie immediately stomped his foot on the brakes, coming to a halt in the middle of the road so sudden that he jerked against the seatbelt with a sharp snap. He whipped his head around to Richie, who was now sinking so low in the passenger seat that his long legs had almost completely folded under the dashboard of Eddie's car.

"What?" Eddie said.

"I don't want to go home," Richie said.

Eddie knew in cities they had all-night diners and 24-hour fast food joints, places you could hang out until the earliest hours of the morning. In Derry, half the stores didn't open on Sundays and the other half closed at 5pm. Nowhere was going to be open before 6am at the earliest and the little green numbers in Eddie's radio told him that it was 1:30am.

"Where are we supposed to go?" He said.

"The Clubhouse?" Richie said, his voice filled with an oddly childlike hopefulness.

"No, dude, it's a mess. It's like a swamp in there," Eddie said. Richie's face fell.

"Everything's dying," Richie said.

"Nothing's dying."

"I don't wanna go home. If my parents see me they're gonna be so mad."

"Your parents are always mad at you."

Eddie said it but regretted it a bit, because the way Richie was crumpling down made him look like the joy and strength was being actively drained out of him by the second and Eddie didn't enjoy making Richie feel bad. They argued, sure, but Eddie didn't want Riche to be  _ unhappy. _

"Where can we go?" Eddie said. He was tired, and kind of cold, despite it being a summer night.

"Why do we have to go anywhere?" Richie said.

"We can't stay here forever."

"Why not?"

"We're in the middle of the road?"

"I thought you didn't want the... The ending... You always start it over."

"What?" Eddie stared at him but Richie was slumping down and refusing to look at him anymore.

He felt guilty but also frustrated. He wished Richie would grow the fuck up, a little bit. He couldn't carry on like this for the rest of his life.

"What are you going to do when you can't call me anymore?" Eddie said.

"Why can't I call you?" Richie said, startled. "What's happening?"

"I'm going to New York."

"Yeah, we can go to New York." Richie perked up at that.

"No, dumbass,  _ I'm _ going to New York. For  _ college." _

Richie looked uncomprehending. Eddie had the brief mental image of biting the steering wheel and ripping it out with his teeth, which was probably not possible.

"We can go to New York," Richie said again.

"We're not going to New York."

There was a soft noise to his right and when he looked, Eddie was shocked to see that Richie had started to cry. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Richie cry, not since they were kids probably, ten or eleven and he'd shed some angry, furious tears after Bowers had broken his glasses yet again. He felt dumb just sitting there and watching the fat drops roll down Richie's cheeks, but he didn't know what to say.

"You're going to New York," Richie said.

"Yeah," Eddie said, his voice coming out lame and unhelpful. "And you're going to University of Maine."

"You're going to forget me."

"I'm not going to forget you," Eddie said, almost angry at the suggestion, though as usual his loudness hid the real truth beneath. The bite of fury disguised the gnawing fear. 

"Bev did," Richie said. His pupils were blown huge in his teary face. 

"I'm not Bev," Eddie said. "I don't- I don't even know what would be left of me if you took away who I am when I'm with you." 

Richie rubbed at his eyes with a balled first. 

"Why can't we do what we want?" He said. "We killed IT we should do what we want-- I killed god when I was thirteen! I saw outside the fucking… They tell you there's a world and there's a life and everyone does it the same way but I saw… The outside. And I can't forget that. I can never forget that. It's changed my brain, it's like it's…"

He was talking rapidly now, looking at Eddie with an urgency that was almost a little frightening in how strongly it made Eddie want to do something,  _ anything _ , if it would mean that Richie wouldn't have to feel this way. 

"I'm different now. We changed. It made my brain different. If the pieces are missing then what… How does…" He stared at Eddie like he was waiting for an answer, but Eddie didn't have one. "The world isn't the way they say it is. If I forget what's outside but I still know they're wrong then what… What do I do? How am I supposed to be the only one who knows? I don't want to be the only one who knows, Eddie, I want to tell someone. I want someone to know me, I don't want people to never know…"

"Stop. Stop. I know. I know you." Eddie gripped Richie's wrist tightly in his hand. "I know." 

Richie blinked back fat tears.

“Where are we going now?” He said. 

Eddie struggled to think of somewhere to go. They could possibly sneak back into his house, but he didn't know what the hell he was going to do with a Richie who was high and probably wouldn't be able to stop himself from making noise and waking up his mom. Mike and Stan had adults who would ask too many questions and get too much in their business. Bill's parents weren't observant, but there was a high risk that they'd still get into their business and the fallout of that wasn't worth it. Then he remembered very suddenly: Ben's mom worked nights. She'd probably still be at the train yard right then, with her flashlight and the big pulp sci-fi novels she worked through when she was waiting out her shifts as security for a place where the biggest threat was teenagers sneaking out looking for trouble. Thankfully, her lack of presence in her own home allowed for exactly that.

"We're going to Ben's house," he said.

"Oh, good," Richie said, sounding relieved. "Ben can fix it."

It was a maybe ten minute drive to Ben's house. He tried to think about what the hell they'd tell Ben when they saw him, but knew that Ben was pretty unlikely to be actually angry with them. It occurred to Eddie that they still had not told Ben that Beverly was in town. He didn't know then that he should tell Richie not to mention it or if putting it in Richie's mind would make him more likely to spill it. Richie was currently trying very hard to rip the sealant out of Eddie's car window and did not react when his name was called so Eddie decided maybe it was best to not say anything in the hopes that it wouldn't come up.

What the fuck was he supposed to say to Ben?  _ Hey, the girl you love? The one who forgot all about you? She's back. She doesn't care, though. She grew up and she doesn't care anymore. About you or about anyone else. _

Ben's street was dead when they got there. Richie leapt out of the car the second it stopped but then completely lost momentum and stood on the sidewalk muttering to himself until Eddie collected him and dragged him up to the front door of Ben's house. He rang the doorbell and eyed the neighbours' houses nervously, hoping no one was going to stick their head out of a window and give them an eye. He could only imagine how quickly that would get back to his mother  _ (Did you know your son and the Tozier boy were out at the crack of dawn bothering the Hanscoms?) _ and then his life would be over.

His mother didn't like the Hanscoms, either. That went without saying; she didn't like any of Eddie's friends, but the Hanscoms were white trash, and clearly Arlene had no idea how to look after a boy and keep him healthy, look at that boy, his heart is going to give out by the time he's fifteen. And what happened to that husband of hers? The Hanscoms were white trash. The Marshes were worse. The Denbroughs were a tragedy that she wanted to snatch Eddie away from, like grief was catching. The Toziers were stuck-up. The Urises were Jews. She didn't know about Mike, and that was probably for the best.

Sometimes Eddie thought that it was going to be the things she said about other people that really made him snap like his own broken arm. He remembered telling her that his friends were the people he should have listened to all along. He was sure she remembered that too.

Ben answered the door after a few minutes, wearing sweatpants and a flannel robe. He blinked blearily at the two of them, his face shot through with alarm.

"What's going on?" He said.

"Can Richie crash here?" Eddie said.

"Yes," Ben said. "Are you ok?"

He waved them both inside. The house was small and perpetually kind of untidy, because Ben and his mom both had a habit of putting half-finished things and projects to the side, with the belief that they'd come back to them later, but it was immediately homey and welcoming. Richie made a beeline to the worn leather sofa and collapsed onto it. Eddie, also exhausted, was a little infuriated at him. He rolled over so his face was pressed into the back cushion. Ben stared at Eddie, waiting for an answer.

"He was at a house party in Orono and took acid," Eddie said. "Now he's just kind of high and uncooperative and he doesn't want to go home."

"Did you go to the party too?" Ben said, a little puzzled.

"No. I just went to save him because he couldn't get back on his own."

Ben's face was sympathetic in a way that made Eddie want to curl up and roll away. He shrugged at Ben and sat heavily and deliberately on Richie's lower legs. Richie yelped with surprise.

"Will your mom be mad?" Eddie said. "If Richie stays?"

"No," Ben said. "She'd probably be more mad if I turned you out on the street. Do you want to stay too?"

_ Yes, _ Eddie thought.

"I probably can't," he said. "If my mom sees I'm not home..."

Ben nodded. He had woken up completely by then, and seemed more cognizant than Eddie felt. He watched Richie with a kind of mild curiosity as Richie tried to bury himself deeper into the worn leather.

"What's he going to do when he doesn't have you to call?" Ben said.

"Find his own way home I guess," Eddie said.

Richie didn't say anything, just lay with his eyes closed staring at the back of the couch. Eddie had the impression that he was pretending to be asleep, though he wasn't sure why. Maybe it was the kind of thing that made more sense when you were high.

"We saw something else," Eddie said, watching Richie's face, which was still in a very deliberate, unpeaceful way. He glanced back at Ben and saw that Ben's face had turned sour. "You still don't want to help."

"Is that selfish?" Ben said.

"I guess."

He didn't look annoyed by this, only like he had been expecting it, and he shrugged.

"I know what Mike said. But it feels like I gave and I tried and..." Ben wavered, like he wasn't sure he was allowed to say what he was saying. "In the stories the hero comes back triumphant and he gets to live happily ever after."

"Yeah," Eddie said. "That's why I stopped reading."

"It's why I keep reading. Maybe when I get out of here I'll stop needing the books so much. Right now it feels like the only ones who understand me are fictional."

"What about us?"

Ben shrugged. "I love you guys. But you know... Bill and Mike have each other, you and Richie have each other... I didn't really realise how lonely I'd always been until I wasn't."

Eddie wished there was something he could say. It felt odd to be defined as part of the  _ other,  _ the ones who wouldn't understand. A selfish part of him wished that he would never have to understand Ben, but becoming Ben felt like the inevitable. The idea that being Ben was a terrible fate felt like such an incredibly cruel thought that Eddie flushed with embarrassment despite not saying it, staring guiltily at the floor.

Richie twitched beside him, struggling to roll over so he wasn't facing the back of the couch anymore. His face looked oddly pink and his eyes were red. It was weed that made your eyes red, right? Not acid?

"Did you tell him?" Richie mumbled from the inside of the couch. "What we saw?"

"Yeah," Eddie said. "Kinda."

"Was it frightening?" Ben said.

"Kinda. Not in the way it used to be. It wasn't like a monster or something, like that..." He never liked talking about the leper. It made him feel ill and upset in a way that nothing else ever really had. "You know how in the Bible it says things were  _ awesome? _ But it doesn't mean cool, it means like, filled with awe. It felt like that."

Ben nodded slowly. His mother had raised him in an atheist household, having her own strong opinions about organised religion, something that had made Eddie vaguely jealous after a childhood of long, boring Catholic church services on holidays or whenever there was family in town. But he was well-read and he knew what Eddie meant, even if he didn't have the childhood trauma of staring at Jesus on the cross and wondering exactly how much he could see from his posting. Maybe seeing IT made you understand what it was like to face God better than a church service ever could. Eddie knew he didn't worry so much about Jesus anymore. 

"What are you going to do?" Ben said.

"Kill IT," Eddie said, with a shrug. “Maybe this time it’ll take.”

“Are you going?” Richie said from the couch.

“Yeah,” Eddie said.

“Please don’t.”

“I have to, Rich, you know my mom.”

“What’re you gonna say when you go to New York?” Richie said. “You think she’ll just understand that time?”

“You’re such a dick.”

He stood up and left the slightly bewildered Richie on the couch as he headed to the door. Ben followed dutifully, as if his good manners weren't going to let him not show a guest out, even if it was just Eddie sneaking back out in the middle of the night. Ben was a nice kid, Eddie thought. He was just a nice  _ person,  _ just thought it was right to be good to people for the sake of it. The idea that the kid who had once helped them put together the dam in the Barrens just so he could help no longer wanted saw the point of it made Eddie feel a great weight in the pit of his stomach.

The adults in Derry were all bad, twisted and blind to the suffering that went on around them. Maybe they hadn't all always been like that, though. Maybe empathy was something you grew out of.

“I don’t know if I would mind forgetting when I leave,” Ben said as he opened the front door for Eddie.

“What are you talking about?” Eddie said, astonished.

Ben fiddled with a stray scrap of paint that was peeling off the corner of the door. 

“It never goes away whether we do anything or not. Wouldn’t it be kind of a relief? And then when I’m alone I wouldn’t…” He shook his head. “Forget it. I’ll see you around, Eddie.”

Eddie threw one last look over his shoulder at Richie, who had fallen down out of sight onto the seat again. Eddie felt briefly kind of guilty and then a little annoyed, walking out to the cold and the dark.

Walking back to his car it occurred to him, not for the first time, that it would be very easy to get in and keep driving, that he didn’t  _ have  _ to go home at all. It was like Bill had told him when they were still in high school; the rules of what they could and could not do were invented. 

“They only work because everyone agrees that they work,” Bill had explained. “Nothing happens if you just stop. They can only hurt you in ways that matter to them.”

Eddie lingered by the door of the car. He thought about sixteen year old Bill’s rage and resentment, Ben’s bitterness, Richie’s resentment. Their mutual disappointment and anger that they had tried to change the world, beaten evil, and gotten nowhere. Eddie jingled the car keys in his hand. In the dark window of the car his face was a pale smudge. He could be eighteen, he could be forty, he could be thirteen. He wondered if there would ever be any difference between himself at those times. He would only ever be himself forever. 

Maybe if he went somewhere else he could be someone else. All he would have to do was get in the car and get back on the I-95. He knew the way, and could picture the roads in his mind in a neat, clear order. One route led to another to another, and then he would be in a city where no one knew him. Maybe that scared him less than it should have. He would be alone in New York, completely and truly alone. 

He reminded himself that Richie wasn’t with him and the appeal of running away instead of just waiting out the next few weeks evaporated. When he got back into the car he drove home without hesitation, and found that his mother had not woken in the night. She had no idea what he’d done, but how was that any different from usual? She had never known what he was capable of. 

He told himself that was his own fault and went to bed.


End file.
